The myth of multipolarity: Are we descending into a new dark age?

Michael Miklaucic recently retired as a senior fellow and editor-in-chief of PRISM at National Defense University. He currently teaches at the University of Chicago and at the University of Sao Paulo, and is a senior fellow of the Center for the Study of Democracy in Sofia, Bulgaria.

Multipolarity is all the rage today. But those who promote multipolarity most enthusiastically are either disingenuous or delusional. The unipolar moment of U.S. hegemony is certainly over. What is emerging, however, is not multipolarity but rather an old form of bipolarity. Not the bipolarity of the Cold War, during which the U.S. and Soviet Union led two rival camps competing for global dominance, but a more ancient and what might be called primordial bipolarity.