The Unipolar Moment, Concluded

The Moment That Ended

In 1990, the political analyst Charles Krauthammer published an article in Foreign Affairs titled “The Unipolar Moment,” which described the post-Cold War strategic landscape as one in which “the immediate post-Cold War world is not multipolar. It is unipolar. The center of world power is the unchallenged superpower, the United States.”¹ The article’s framework, which became the operational framework of American foreign-policy thinking across the subsequent two decades, treated the United States as the singular global power capable of underwriting the international order in the absence of the Soviet counterweight. The framework had substantial empirical foundation in the early 1990s: American military spending exceeded the combined spending of the next ten countries; American economic capacity exceeded the next several economies combined; American technological and institutional advantages were substantial across most operational domains.

The unipolar-moment framework organized American foreign-policy practice across the 1990-2008 period through a sequence of operational expressions. The 1991 Gulf War demonstrated the operational capability to assemble multilateral military coalitions under American leadership and to conduct successful conventional military operations at substantial scale. The 1990s humanitarian interventions (Somalia, Bosnia, Kosovo) demonstrated the willingness to deploy American military force in the absence of direct American national-security interests. The 1990s economic-policy framework — the Washington Consensus, the IMF and World Bank conditionality framework, the broader globalization-era institutional architecture — demonstrated the willingness to organize the international economic order around American policy preferences. The 2001 post-9/11 global-war-on-terror framework, the 2003 Iraq War, the broader post-9/11 security architecture demonstrated the willingness to deploy American military and intelligence capabilities at substantial global scale.

The framework’s structural assumptions were two: that American economic and military capacity would continue to exceed any plausible adversary or coalition of adversaries across the relevant horizon, and that American institutional capacity to design and execute foreign-policy initiatives would continue to be adequate to the scale of the initiatives the framework would attempt. Both assumptions were, on the operational record across the post-2003 period, substantially incorrect.

The 2003 Iraq War is the principal contemporary case study of the unipolar-moment framework’s structural inadequacy. The decision to invade Iraq, made by the Bush administration on the framework that the operation would be brief, would be self-financing through Iraqi oil revenue, and would produce a stable democratic outcome that would substantially modify the regional political landscape, was based on assumptions that the operational record subsequently substantially refuted.² The operation extended for over eight years (2003-2011), cost approximately one to two trillion dollars in direct expenditure, produced approximately four thousand five hundred American military casualties and over thirty thousand seriously wounded, contributed to the instability that subsequently produced the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, and did not produce the stable democratic outcome the framework had assumed.³ The operational record of the Iraq War is the principal contemporary American case in which the unipolar-moment framework’s assumptions were tested at substantial scale and were found, on the empirical record, to be substantially inadequate.

The 2008 financial crisis is the second principal case study, on the economic axis. The crisis demonstrated that the American economic capacity that the unipolar-moment framework had assumed was structurally vulnerable to the financial-system features that the post-1980s deregulatory framework had institutionalized; the crisis required substantial Federal Reserve intervention and substantial federal-government bailout to stabilize the American financial system; the crisis produced the substantial reduction in American economic dynamism across the subsequent decade that the contemporary Federal Reserve and Treasury data have documented.⁴ The crisis was not, in operational terms, a failure of any specific American foreign-policy decision; it was the structural demonstration that the American economic capacity the unipolar-moment framework had assumed was substantially less robust than the framework had treated it as being.

The 2014 Russian annexation of Crimea, the 2017 Trump administration’s structural challenges to the post-1945 alliance framework, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic’s exposure of the supply-chain vulnerabilities the post-1990 globalization framework had institutionalized, the 2021 American withdrawal from Afghanistan, the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and the subsequent regional escalation — the post-2014 sequence of foreign-policy challenges has, in cumulative operational effect, demonstrated that the unipolar-moment framework no longer accurately describes the operational environment American foreign policy operates within.⁵ The contemporary American foreign-policy framework has not, despite the cumulative empirical record, structurally adapted to the new environment.

The Multipolar Reality

The contemporary international system is, by the standard contemporary international-relations literature, a multipolar system in which several states or state coalitions possess substantial military, economic, and institutional capacity, and in which no single state has the structural capacity the unipolar-moment framework assumed.⁶ The principal poles in the contemporary system are: the United States and its broader alliance network (NATO, the East Asian alliances, the broader American partnership architecture); China, which has, across the post-2000 period, developed substantial military, economic, and technological capacity that approaches American capacity in several operational domains; Russia, which has, despite the substantial economic limitations the post-Cold-War period exposed, retained the substantial military capacity (including the strategic nuclear arsenal) that establishes Russia as a substantial power; the European Union, which operates as a coordinated economic and increasingly geopolitical actor distinct from the American framework; and the broader category of regional powers (India, Brazil, Turkey, Iran, Saudi Arabia) whose capacity is substantial within their regions and whose foreign-policy independence has expanded across the post-2008 period.

The structural feature of the multipolar system that the contemporary American foreign-policy framework has been slowest to adapt to is that the American capacity to set the operational framework unilaterally has substantially diminished. The American defense budget, while remaining the largest in absolute terms, no longer exceeds the combined budgets of the next several powers in the manner the unipolar-moment framework assumed. American economic capacity, while remaining the largest economy in absolute terms, no longer exceeds the combined capacity of the principal economic competitors in the manner the framework assumed. American institutional capacity — the State Department, the intelligence services, the broader foreign-policy apparatus — has, across the post-2000 period, been substantially eroded through the combination of personnel reductions, the post-9/11 reorientation toward counterterrorism at the expense of broader diplomatic and intelligence capacity, and the post-2017 institutional disruption that the Trump administration’s reorganization initiatives produced.⁷ The American capacity to underwrite the global order on the unipolar-moment framework’s terms has, on the cumulative operational record, substantially diminished.

The structural alternative — the operational framework that adapts to the multipolar reality rather than continuing to operate against the unipolar-moment assumptions — has been the subject of extensive contemporary policy analysis and has not, in operational terms, become the operational framework of either major-party coalition. The framework’s principal substantive components are: the substantial commitment to alliance maintenance as the principal mechanism through which the United States can effectively project capacity in the multipolar environment; the substantial commitment to domain-appropriate investment in the capabilities that twenty-first-century security actually requires (cyber, intelligence, technology, space) rather than the conventional military hardware the post-Cold-War framework had emphasized; the substantial commitment to diplomatic capacity as the principal cost-effective instrument of American foreign-policy projection; and the categorical end of regime-change operations as an instrument of American policy, on the empirical record of the post-2003 attempts.

The Two Parties’ Two Failures

The Democratic-coalition position on foreign policy across the post-2008 period has been, in operational terms, the substantial continuation of the post-Cold-War liberal-internationalist framework with marginal modifications for the contemporary environment. The Obama administration’s foreign-policy framework — the Asia-Pacific rebalance, the Iran nuclear deal, the limited engagement in Syria, the Libya intervention, the broader pattern of post-Iraq restraint paired with selective engagement — was the principal contemporary expression of the Democratic-coalition framework. The Biden administration’s framework — the Ukraine response, the Indo-Pacific alliance maintenance, the broader continuation of the post-Obama framework — has been substantially similar.⁸ The Democratic-coalition framework has substantially preserved the alliance architecture the post-1945 American foreign policy constructed, has substantially supported continued American leadership of the international order, and has substantially declined the categorical commitments — the categorical end of regime-change operations, the categorical reduction of conventional military spending in favor of the cyber-and-intelligence capacities, the categorical commitment to diplomacy over force — that the structural alternative would require.

The Republican-coalition position has been structurally fractured across the post-2016 period and has produced different operational outcomes across different contexts. The traditional Republican-coalition framework, organized around the post-Reagan liberal-internationalist-with-hawkish-features framework, has been substantially displaced within the contemporary Republican coalition by the post-2016 populist-nationalist framework that the Trump administration’s foreign-policy practice substantially expressed. The contemporary Republican-coalition framework’s principal operational features include the substantial skepticism about the post-1945 alliance architecture (NATO especially, but extending to the East Asian alliances), the categorical opposition to multilateral institutions and frameworks, the bilateral-transactional approach to foreign-policy questions, and the broader substitution of strength-and-deterrence rhetoric for the substantive engagement frameworks the prior Republican-coalition framework had supported.⁹ The contemporary Republican-coalition framework is, in operational terms, substantially internally inconsistent — combining elements of restraint (skepticism about the post-1945 alliance architecture) with elements of intervention (the substantial military expenditure, the willingness to deploy force in selective contexts) — in ways that have not produced a coherent operational alternative to the Democratic-coalition framework.

The convergent failure of the two parties has been the absence of any serious legislative or executive framework for the structural adaptation the multipolar reality requires. The Democratic-coalition has substantially preserved the unipolar-moment framework’s institutional architecture without adapting the framework to the new operational environment. The Republican-coalition has substantially challenged the institutional architecture without proposing a coherent alternative. Neither has advanced the structural framework the previous section described.

What’s at Stake

The Intelligent Party’s policy framework on foreign policy, articulated in the platform’s foreign-policy position, is the seven-component proposal that addresses the structural features the previous sections diagnosed.¹⁰ The components are: reaffirmation of NATO and Indo-Pacific alliance commitments; reduction of conventional military spending with reinvestment in cyber, intelligence, and space; rebuilding of State Department capacity and diplomatic infrastructure; strategic technology competition with China (semiconductors, AI, biotech); the categorical end of regime-change operations as a policy tool; targeted sanctions with sunset clauses replacing blanket sanctions; and reopening of diplomatic channels with adversaries on nuclear and arms control.

The framework’s structural distinctiveness, against both major-party positions, is the explicit recognition of the multipolar reality and the operational adaptation to that reality. The framework substantially preserves the alliance architecture (against the Republican-coalition’s post-2016 skepticism) while substantially modifying the operational capabilities the architecture deploys (against the Democratic-coalition’s continuation of the conventional-military framework). The framework’s commitment to alliance maintenance is the principal cost-effective mechanism through which the United States can project capacity in the multipolar environment; the framework’s commitment to domain-appropriate investment is the principal mechanism through which the actual capabilities the contemporary environment requires can be developed.

The framework’s most operationally distinctive component is the categorical end of regime-change operations as a policy tool. The component is the structural acknowledgment that the post-2003 operational record has substantially refuted the unipolar-moment framework’s assumption that American military capacity could reliably produce stable favorable political outcomes in target countries; the component substitutes the alternative framework that treats regime-change operations as categorically off the table, with the operational consequence that American policy must engage with the existing governments of foreign countries on the framework that those governments will continue to exist.

The political coalition required to enact the framework does not currently exist in operationally effective form. The conditions under which it might assemble are the conditions the broader fourth-settlement framework requires.

The realism the previous essays have called for, applied to foreign policy, is the realism that the structural adaptation is achievable on the specific architecture the platform has proposed; that the architecture has been designed to address the structural features the multipolar reality has produced; that the principal obstacles to its enactment are the institutional inertia of the existing foreign-policy apparatus and the broader structural features the broader fourth-settlement framework would address. The conditions under which the obstacles break are the conditions the broader settlement requires.

The unipolar moment is the moment that has, on the cumulative operational record, ended. The structural adaptation is the operational framework the next decade will either produce or refuse. The realism is the realism the multipolar reality demands: the contemporary American foreign-policy capacity is substantial but is not, on the operational record, adequate to the unipolar-moment framework’s continued operation; the structural alternative the platform has proposed is the operational adaptation the contemporary environment requires.

The reform is the reform the operational record has supported, that the comparative international-relations literature has validated, and that the structural environment has, across two decades of cumulative evidence, substantially required. The non-enactment has been the operational outcome of the institutional inertia that the broader fourth-settlement framework would, in its broader institutional-capacity components, structurally address.

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Notes