Who are the actors in the play “Polycentric Power”?

Have the spheres of influence been redrawn at Anchorage in Alaska? Will the Budapest meeting between transactional leader Donald Trump and intransigent Vladimir Putin still take place? What negotiations took place between the American and Chinese leaders? Has Taiwan gained prominence? Is the global South too calm in the confrontation with the nervous world in the West? Is the East too hot? These are some questions that concern not only the world’s geopoliticians but also the entire human civilization. We are surviving in a polycentric world. The USA no longer wants to be the world’s gendarme. Nor does it have the necessary strength, resources, and determination. The first signs of the Americans giving up on the European colony are given by the withdrawal of troops from the east of the continent. If during the Marshall Plan, the American occupation of Germany was legitimate or—let’s say—appropriate, now the EU states can handle themselves. They have even decided to arm themselves to the teeth.

A skilled businessman, Donald Trump ensured at the NATO Summit in The Hague that the member countries of the North American alliance would go shopping on the American arms market. The hunter in the White House shot three birds with one stone. He increased American incomes, reduced the deficit with the EU, and fed the hungry mouth of the American military arsenal. “He gave; he didn’t take” is his nickname praised by investors. By the way, did he check how his allies in the business world doubled their fortunes in just nine months? Only stock market professionals know what returns the president’s “change of mind” produces. The victory of a radical socialist, Zohran Mamdani, in the New York elections and of three other Democrats in other states shows a low pulse of the Republican body and a suffering history of MAGA, but Trump is fearlessly moving forward towards a target that no one sees.

Pax Americana is a closed chapter in history. The New World Order, foreshadowed by Gorbachev and George H. W. Bush, is no longer relevant. Trump has put it on the shelf for sunnier times for America. There is talk of multipolarity or polycentric power. But who ensures the axis mundi?

We are witnessing the triple division of the world: the West in decline, a global South in ascendancy, and an America in reorganization. This strangely reminds us of the three-way division of the world in George Orwell’s novel “1984,” where Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia fought a permanent war of shifting alliances.

But Orwell was writing at a time when much of what is now called the Global South was the colonies of Western empires. Large states like Brazil, India, South Africa, and Indonesia had broken free. What was apartheid but a British occupation regime? In recent years, a new multipolar world has emerged with at least four distinct sources of power: China, Russia, the United States, and the new rising powers, the BRICS. America remains a central pillar in this new world congregation, called multipolarity. The United States is blessed with a vast territory, a dynamic economy, and enviable prosperity. Let’s not forget that the United States uses only 20% of the hydrocarbons it possesses. It is also freeing itself from the mentorship of Europe! The EU states have grown big; they can handle themselves.

Globalization (other than the globalist ideology) is currently in a state of flux. The new world economic system has no management. The oligarchs do not understand the powers that have emerged from nowhere. Now, economic nationalism is becoming a much more common refrain than free trade. If in the past they were the followers of the free market, the US is bringing back the isolationism of the period of the struggle for independence by imposing tariff barriers at levels not seen on the global stage since Roosevelt. Have you studied where that president’s reform led? To the collapse of the US economy, even before the Second World War.
China, with its radiant power, remains a powerful sun that cannot be ignored. Russia, without Ukraine, is a regional power. With Ukraine, an empire, Zbigniew Brzeziński, a former advisor to two American presidents, would prophesy.

The East will remain divided as long as neighboring agreements are not sought. Even if, for security reasons, the US will not be able to withdraw from the area, the conflicting states can sit down at the dialogue table. The Arab countries are no longer naive. Turkey will not be able to play permanent doubles. Iran remains a nuclear power. India becomes a continent that is breaking away from the dying British Empire.

Of course, Sharm el-Sheikh remains nothing more than a tourist destination, not a beacon of peace, as Donald Trump wants. If today the Far East has become an economic tiger, it is because of the greedy West, which preferred to purchase cheap products and services. The Westerners’ peace has come to an end. Nothing will be the same again. If there is one certainty, it is that Europe is collapsing under its own edifice of power, like the thousand-year-old tower in the center of Rome the other day.

By Marius Ghilezan