America has caught a whiff of a changing world. CIA Director William Burns has grudgingly acknowledged that “the United States… is no longer the only big kid on the geopolitical bloc. And our position at the head of the table isn’t guaranteed.” But America’s dogmatic inability to see past its old paradigm has prevented it from understanding that change. The United States has drifted outside the geopolitical current.
Russia, China and India insist that multipolarity is not a goal on the distant horizon but a current reality. “The trend toward multipolarity in the world is inevitable. It will only intensify. And those who do not understand this and do not follow this trend will lose,” Putin has said. Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov has called multipolarity “a fact, a geopolitical reality.” “The landscape,” India’s External Affairs Minister Subrahmanyam Jaishankar agrees “has now changed irreversibly.”
But in its inability to adapt, the U.S. clings to the battle to prevent the unipolar world’s slip back into bipolarity. The U.S. remains capable only of seeing a world divided into two blocs: it sees every nation that accepts its hegemony as one bloc and every nonaligned nation in the multipolar world that refuses to choose between two sides as the other bloc. The U.S. is incapable of seeing past the bipolar world and mistakes the multipolar reality as the other bloc in a bipolar world.
That is a misconception that prevents the U.S. from aligning itself with the inevitable new reality of the international order. Being unaligned with reality has frustrated American foreign policy.
In the outdated American model, India, the largest country in the world and a growing power, is the weight whose choice of sides will determine which block prevails. Long a partner of the U.S. and a key friend of Russia, India has a foot in both blocs of the world as the U.S. sees it. Bringing India fully into the American camp is a key to U.S. foreign policy.
But the members of the emerging multipolar world do not see the new world as one in which they have to choose sides. The U.S. continues to woo countries with gifts and to threaten countries with sanctions to seduce them into exclusive partnerships. But the outdated U.S. worldview restricts it to desperately courting countries into exclusive relationships that their worldview no longer allows them to enter into.
Hellbound and Down 