Mthobeli Jiwulane

The geopolitics are getting dicier by the day but one thing for sure the silent battle for multipolarity is gaining momentum over unipolarity currently in place.

While the United States is doing all in its power to pursue its dominance in the world including current consolidation against Russia and China, it seems this battle is being lost already.

Several interesting developments that occurred in the recent past proved that multipolarity is inevitable while a world dominated by one remaining hegemon, the US, is on the decline.

The US renewed effort to consolidate the North Atlantic Alliance around the Ukrainian cause has seen an unprecedented integration of Eurasia and counterweight and an emerging alternative centre of in the vicinity of Europe, the axis of the last two world wars and most probably the Third World War. The integration of Russia, China and Iran should be a major source of concern for the US. All three had one thing in common – to have been continuously and variously antagonised by the United States to the brink into seeking one another against the common enemy.

The war in Ukraine essentially brought Russia and China closer to each other in a very unprecedented way. Never before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, as the West calls it or the “special military operation” as Russia describes it, had the interaction between the two countries been as frequent as is the case now. President Xi Jinping had met Vladimir Putin more than 40 times since taking power ten years ago and has had 8 state visits to Russia within that period – that’s almost one state visit per year. The results of the interactions, says independent South African political analyst Sandile Swana, had been “concrete and profitable”. China hinted it could be compelled to assist Moscow in case of NATO attacking Russia directly during the Ukrainian war.

The advocates of unipolarity, on the one hand, are in an existential fight which should be effortless as it’s about the retention of dominance. On the other hand, multipolarity faces an uphill battle to first defeat unipolarity before it is fully entrenched.

It’s commonly accepted that an ideal and secure set-up for international society is a multipolar world where power is distributed equally among all states rather one or two powerful ones embroiled in a never-ending cat-fight. This ensued during the Cold War, where the US and the former Soviet Union consolidated their respective allies in their battle for dominance. This was the period for the arms race with its accompanying accumulation of the speediest missiles and nuclear weapons by both ‘super-powers’.

This rat-race was temporarily disrupted by the fall of the Soviet Union in December 1991 preceded by the literal fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that saw the subsequent ushering of the unipolar world with the United States in the driving seat.

The crumbling of the Soviet Union resulted in former Eastern Europe states going their separate ways to sovereignty. With the dissipation of the Warsaw Pact as well some of them even joined the former enemy bloc, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO).
The process produced a convincing argument that indeed Capitalism had triumphed over socialism/communism. This ideological transition was best described by Seema Guha in her recent article in Outlook India that “Capitalism won hands down” over Communism. However, she was quick to suggest that social democracy was best alternative to both the “dead” communism and “faulty” capitalism to address the needs of the poor.

Guha may be right considering the crisis that Capitalism was currently facing with ongoing protests in most Western capitals in a fightback by disillusioned economically depressed masses.

The unravelling of the Soviet Union opened the highway for an unchallenged unipolarity to prevail where the US dominated and Russia was left very weak and vulnerable as stand-alone state with no strength in numbers.

Realising its vulnerability, the lonely Russia embarked on journey of “sovietising” itself by rebuilding its military strength. This had effectively brought new cold war between the West and Russia as a military power along with China as a growing economic behemoth. Sitting at the helm of this power battle for each side are both war-mongers Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin.

Russia had reached the level where it was on par with the United States at least in terms of military strength although non-Western analysts like Alex Krainer optimistically believe that on its own Russia could in fact defeat NATO in a war.

Russia also looked beyond the former East bloc for friends, who off course would be enemies to the United States. China, Iran and even North Korea were the obvious allies. The results had been the gradual Eurasian integration in the last six months.

China’s role as a broker of peace accords is gaining traction. Recently China brokered a peace deal between old Middle East arch-rival Saudi Arabia and Iran, ending years of tension between the two Arab nations. Similarly China, along with Turkiye and a group of African leaders mediated at different times in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian war. All these peace initiatives came without the West’s involvement, raising debate about the rise of the global South over the North as working for world peace while the North pursues war.

Another development that undermined unipolarity was the rapid growth of developing nations’ forum, Brazil Russia India China and South Africa (BRICS). BRICS has proven to be a direct threat to the Western dominance in various ways.

According to Prof, Ntsikelelo Breakfast, a political analyst based at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, BRICS was meant to “create a bipolar economic world order in which no single bloc must entrench its hegemony” over other nations.

He opined that the United Nations and fellow international organisations such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were designed to entrench the US economic and ideological dominance but BRICS emerged as a parallel bloc to counter that. “BRICS poses a threat to the United States’ economic hegemony, it bound to change the unipolar world order imposed by the United States. But this will not happen overnight,” Breakfast says.

Various experts raised the question of the BRICS Development Bank, established on 15 July 2014, as the first step that the developing nations took towards disrupting the dominance of the Bretton Woods Institutions in the world economy.

The BRICS Bank supports public and private projects through loans, guarantees, equity participation and other financial instruments. The bank became a reality with the opening of its headquarters in Shanghai, China, in July 2015 and regional offices in each of the current member states.

The bank, which runs parallel to the mainly American-funded World Bank and IMF, obviously was set to be bankrolled chiefly by China as the richest of all the developing countries, but the initial capital amount of $100 billion from all five current member states. The poor nations and the developing countries believed the bank would help them avoid the harsh conditions that come with the World Bank and IMF loans that oblige them to adopt capitalist neoliberal policies and Western-styled “democratisation”.

Another bone of contention had been the decision to de-dollarize trade within BRICS, a move that resonates among developing nations including some that were not yet BRICS members. This further intensifies the new cold war between West and the East or the global North and the global South.

Dr Jan Venter, an international relations expert at North West University, says China and Russia are positioning themselves for a new economic bloc and a new military alliance in opposition to the G7 and NATO respectively. He says with its economic muscle China will definitely become the leader of the potentially mighty economic bloc that is slowly emerging from BRICS.

“They are trying to turn BRICS into opposition bloc against the West, but I don’t see this happening any time soon,” Venter says.
However, the expert expressed doubt about the de-dollarization move and questioned its sustainability. “Who is going to provide the gold to back that currency? Maybe it’s a wishful thinking at the moment,” Venter says.

BRICS is set to grow even more – with at least 16 countries known to have applied to join the forum including the oil-rich Saudi Arabia, Iran and United Arab Emirates. Obviously many African states including Egypt and some South American such as Argentina and Venezuela would like to be counted among BRICS members.

With a third of the world population residing in the BRICS countries, the bloc is set to be an economic giant to rival the G7. Some even saw the decision of many African countries not to vote with the West against Russia at the United Nations over its invasion of Ukraine last year as the first indicator of a political realignment that favoured the global South.

All this clearly points to multi-polarity as the only pole that the world is heading to – thanks to the bullying approach to geopolitics that had been adopted by the United States since the end of the initial Cold War.