A thousand poles are blooming as new international blocs like the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS Development Bank emerge to challenge Western economic and military hegemony.
Vladimir Putin is not reviving the Cold War. Rather, the U.S. failed to end it when it had the chance.
The recent round of sanctions aimed at Moscow could backfire on Washington by accelerating a move away from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency.
Two years ago, Turkey was on its way to being a player in Central Asia, a major power broker in the Middle East, and a driving force in international politics. Now it’s at war with one of its neighbors, at odds with regional powers, and plagued by internal insurgency. What happened?
As U.S. unilateralism has asserted the role of the United States as the sole global superpower, the rest of the world is exploring a variety of ways of pushing back. One is the creation of several new regional security consortiums which are independent of the U.S. One of the most important is the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), a security alliance led by Russia and China, with several non-voting members including India. Its rising economic, political and military profile this year can serve as a useful lens through which to view this geopolitical pushback. It is based on promoting a multipolar world, distributing power along multiple poles in the international system, such as the United States, Europe, Asia-Eurasia and the Middle East,1 while also promoting the multilateralism of international cooperation.2 In recent years, Russia and China have stepped up their advocacy for a multipolar-multilateral alternative.
Great power competition in Central Asia ebbs and flows in a timeless and tireless fashion. Unlike in Europe and East Asia during the Cold War and after, the fault line for the current jockeying for position in Central Asia between Washington and Beijing is not easily discernible. Instead, fluidity, uncertainty, and even outright reversal of fortunes among the major players have been the norm.