Developments in the late 1980s and 1990s gave rise to a cooperative pattern which strengthened the role of the United Nations and the UN Security Council in particular, as a place of coordination and cooperation among the major powers. While not perfect, this pattern dominated the UN’s work and reached many areas of international relations, allowing for a high level of global strategic stability. This is an important achievement: strategic stability existed despite clear military imbalance. US military spending, the sole remaining superpower, was higher than that of all the other major powers (i.e. Russia, China, India, Japan and Europe) combined. Strategic stability in this situation of imbalance was an important element of global peace. It preserved, at least for the time being, the necessary rational state behavior with regard to nuclear weapons and enhanced the importance of nuclear non-proliferation as a central point for global peace.
The twenty-first century started with a shock when the US was attacked on September 11, 2001. The superpower’s response was strong and dominated by an overly militarized reaction to the threat of terrorism, called the “the war on terror”. This response culminated in the war against Iraq in 2003. Now, more than ten years after the war, it is clear that one of the war’s many effects was to demonstrate the limits of American unilateral action. In the aftermath of the war, the US returned to its role as the indispensable nation, the phrase coined a decade and a half earlier, and thus buried the notion of unipolarity.
This brings us to the second-stage answer. The first decade of the twenty-first century brought rise to several phenomena, long in the making, which define our world as essentially pluralistic, if not clearly multipolar. China’s economic rise, the emergence of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) group and the G20 all marked an important change in the global economic balance of power, one with the necessary though not yet visible strategic and military consequences.
The financial crisis of 2007–2008 made its own contribution to the change. The EU’s relative decline of power and influence is probably not irreversible, but the EU will have to make a great effort to establish itself as a major global player. The US, on the other hand, was more successful in overcoming the crisis and opened ←5 | 6→a new chapter in its global role, which initially looked much more collective than unilateral in its outlook.
These changes cited above had a major impact on the global security, economic and political landscape which has moved towards multipolarity. However, a note of caution is necessary here. The situation now cannot be equated with the multipolarity and balance of power of the nineteenth century. Similar to earlier historical periods, the major powers of our era compete and cooperate, but unlike previous periods, today’s cooperation levels and interdependence is qualitatively much higher. Interdependence is measured daily in stock markets around the world and is a constant reminder that competition must be kept within limits. None of today’s major powers can afford competition which would destroy the existing economic equilibrium. The cost would simply be too high and would necessarily have political and security consequences beyond acceptable levels for each of these global players.
An additional feature of the current global pluralism is the growing importance of various security arrangements, both global and regional. These have been strengthened in the past two decades and have produced positive effects for global security and development. The number of large-scale armed conflicts had been decreasing until 2011, and there was a growing contribution to this trend by international security structures, underpinned by real power. The UN Security Council continued to play its role as the global body with primary responsibility for international peace and security. However, in the period following 2011, the situation deteriorated. The military conflicts in Libya, Syria and Ukraine were the main hotbeds of crisis, while, international security weakened and relations among the main powers were deteriorating.
On the other hand, international cooperative regimes such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the Bretton Woods institutions have been largely maintained. They need further change and reform to better represent the changing distribution of economic and financial power, but this is not an impossible task. Reform and adjustment should be the order of the day for all international institutions, including the United Nations.
Third, how do these changes affect security issues today? This question can only be fully be answered with reference to regionally defined realities. The past two decades have continued to demonstrate the critical importance of the geographic imperative in today’s increasingly multipolar world. Therefore, I suggest that the third, and most important part of the answer to the question of multipolarity should be considered in relation to these geographic realities, especially Eurasia.
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When Sir Halford Mackinder, a British geographer and political thinker, and founder of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), published his celebrated article “The Geographical Pivot of History” in 1904, he explained global geography as consisting of the “global ocean” covering nine-twelfths of the globe, the “World-Island” consisting of Eurasia and Africa, and the lands of the “Outer Insular Crescent” included the Americas, Australia and smaller islands. He argued that the World-Island dominated the world, and that Europe and Asia were intrinsically linked. In his analysis, Europe was, in essence, a peninsula with a disproportionately long seacoast, which made it a strong maritime power and helped establish its historically dominant role. Nevertheless, Europe remained a peninsula, while the pivot area on which the fate of great world empires rested was the Heartland of Central Asia.3
Mackinder’s theory strongly influenced political thinking in the twentieth century and inspired much of the geostrategic thinking leading to World War II as well as post-war arrangements. Europe lost its earlier dominant role after World War II and was replaced by the North Atlantic Alliance. Together with the United States, the main part of the “Outer Insular Crescent,” Europe is no longer a mere peninsula, but an important part of a strong transatlantic power, capable of projecting global influence.
For most of the twentieth century, the Asian part of the “World-Island” was dominated by the existence of the Soviet Union and its relations with China. This has changed dramatically since the collapse of Soviet Union and the rise of China, but this pivot area in Central Asia remains as important as ever.
The geopolitics of the post-cold war era has not yet fully crystallized and the outcome that might be expected from the current development of global multipolarity has not emerged yet.4 Assuming that war is not the preferred option for any of the principal players, there are two main strategic behavior options for the main power in the future: containment and partnership.
Containment has been historically tested and lends itself easily to the military logic of the threat of war while the preferred objective is avoiding war. This worked in the distant as well as recent past. At the time of the “Great Game” during the nineteenth century, the protection of British India inspired Great Britain to apply the policy of containment towards Russia. This led to the arrangements between the two countries with regards to Afghanistan and Iran, and to the multilateral arrangements for the Eastern Mediterranean (the Regime of the Straits of Bosphorus and the Dardanelles and the arrangement for Cyprus).
During the Cold War, the US-led containment policy of the Soviet Union was central to the whole bipolar system of that era. In the past two decades, various forms of containment have been applied by Russia and China, against the ←7 | 8→perceived threat of radical Islam in Central Asia. The United States applied the policy of containment against Iran and against the perceived possibility of restoration, in one form or another, of Russian