The World Is Drifting Toward Multipolarity: Not Remaining Unipolar Because a Leading American Foreign Policy Journal Claims It Is

The assertion that the world remains unipolar depends on how one defines power. Measured by industrial depth, theatre denial, fiscal capacity, and energy infrastructure rather than institutional stewardship, the system shows clear signs of constraint and gradual multipolar drift.

The shift did not begin in theory. It began in artillery parks outside Bakhmut, in missile arcs over Kyiv, and in the Red Sea where United States destroyers expended high value interceptors against low cost drones. The grammar of power changed first in combat. Theory followed reluctantly.

For three decades after the Cold War, American power projection rested on structural assumptions that appeared permanent. Carrier strike groups could move forward without sustained maritime denial. Air superiority could be established and sustained. Precision strike was asymmetric. Industrial replenishment was backgrounded because the tempo of war did not test it.

Ukraine dissolved those assumptions. Oversight documentation and defense testimony confirmed what operational planners already understood. The transfer of artillery, air defense systems, and precision munitions required emergency appropriations and multi year production expansion. The baseline industrial posture was optimized for efficiency and limited contingencies, not for sustained industrial war.

The issue was not capability. It was tempo. Modern high intensity war consumes munitions at industrial speed. Replenishment timelines are measured in years. Air defense interceptors are not abstract capacities. They are inventory. Each launch removes stock. Production ramps confirm structural friction rather than eliminate it.

The Red Sea exposed the cost exchange ratio in numerical terms. A Standard Missile interceptor costs in the low millions of dollars per unit. Estimates of long range drones used by non state actors often fall in the tens of thousands. Even allowing for uncertainty, the ratio can approach one hundred to one. Tactical interception remains effective. The structural question is sustainability. When high cost interceptors are expended against low cost saturation systems, friction is mathematical.

Saturation is now a governing variable. In the Western Pacific, the structural pressure intensifies. Surface combatants rely on finite vertical launch cells. Those cells must allocate between air defense, ballistic missile defense, land attack, and antisubmarine functions. Every engagement is a drawdown decision. A destroyer with ninety six cells does not possess infinite endurance. Replenishment requires industrial throughput, dockyard access, and secure logistics lines.

Official defense assessments describe a layered denial architecture designed to compress operating space within the First Island Chain. Anti ship ballistic missiles, long range cruise missiles, integrated surveillance networks, expanding naval production, and dense sensor fusion alter survivability assumptions. Carrier strike groups remain formidable instruments of power. But survivability is now conditional rather than assumed.

The first inversion is operational. Power projection is no longer defined by the ability to deploy anywhere. It is defined by the ability to operate inside contested missile envelopes while sustaining industrial replenishment under tempo stress.

Industrial Scale and the Systemic Challenge

Russia demonstrates attritional endurance. China represents systemic scale. Russia has reorganized wartime production to sustain artillery output and missile manufacturing under sanctions. The significance lies not in absolute parity but in endurance. Moscow has demonstrated the capacity to impose prolonged attritional cost on a coalition that assumed rapid degradation.

China operates on a different structural level. International shipbuilding data show China accounting for well over half of global commercial shipbuilding tonnage, and in some recent years its share has exceeded seventy percent of new orders. The United States share is marginal. Shipbuilding is not naval power. It is industrial capacity that can be redirected and expanded.

China’s advantage is real, but it is not frictionless. Commercial hulls are not vertical launch capacity, and industrial tonnage does not automatically translate into sensors, propulsion, seekers, guidance systems, and secure communications. The valley between industrial scale and high end combat power is crowded with bottlenecks. Yet scale still matters because bottlenecks are solved over time by supply chain depth, tooling, workforce density, and sustained iteration. A system that dominates global steel production, rare earth processing, battery manufacturing, electronics assembly, and intermediate goods has more pathways through bottlenecks than a system rebuilding under stress.

Manufacturing value added statistics reinforce the divergence. China’s manufacturing output exceeds that of any other state and in several categories the gap with the United States is measured in multiples. In batteries, grid components, solar modules, and rare earth processing, Chinese firms hold commanding shares of global supply. These sectors feed both civilian growth and military conversion.

Treating Russia and China as a single strategic actor would be a mistake. Their interests diverge. Russia’s attritional role destabilizes precisely the global stability that China’s development model prefers. The constraint on the United States does not require a monolithic bloc. It requires a functional division of pressure. Russia bleeds inventories and attention in Europe. China builds systemic depth and denial leverage in Asia. The alignment is pragmatic rather than unified. That makes it more resilient because it does not depend on perfect coordination.

A serious counterargument holds that China may be peaking due to demographics, debt exposure, and slower growth. The property sector has imposed strain on local government financing vehicles. Demographic headwinds are real. These factors may slow acceleration. They do not erase the installed base. Polarity is not determined by growth rates alone. It is determined by relative capacity, supply chain position, and the ability to sustain denial and production under stress. Even a slower China remains a structural constraint if it holds industrial and logistical foundations in contested domains.

The systemic question is not whether China can replicate the entire American alliance network. It is whether it can sustain theatre denial while expanding industrial depth. On present evidence that possibility cannot be dismissed.

A leading and widely respected publication known for its extensive essays on geopolitics has argued that the world remains unipolar. Its reasoning defines a pole as a state capable of projecting global military power, anchoring alliances, leading frontier technologies, shaping norms, and absorbing systemic shocks. By that standard only one state qualifies.

The reasoning is internally consistent. The limitation lies in the definition. The criteria embed the attributes of the incumbent and treat incomplete replication as proof that structure is unchanged. Kenneth Waltz defined polarity through distribution of capabilities under anarchy. Robert Gilpin warned that hegemonic systems weaken when the costs of maintaining order exceed the economic base that sustains them. John Mearsheimer emphasized that great powers respond to structural limits rather than institutional preference.

Under these standards, theatre denial backed by industrial endurance alters structure even if managerial dominance persists elsewhere.

The Political Economy of Overreach

Military capability does not operate independently of fiscal structure. The United States is not fiscally insolvent. It is fiscally leveraged. Congressional projections show debt to output ratios rising over the coming decade. Net interest payments are among the fastest growing components of federal expenditure. Interest obligations are fixed. Defense procurement is discretionary.

A critic will object that in an existential contest fiscal orthodoxy can be abandoned through financial repression, directed credit, inflation tolerance, and emergency mobilization. That is correct. The deeper constraint is structural rather than political. Industrial mobilization requires machine tools, skilled labor, domestic supply chain density, and fabrication capacity. The United States retains formidable strengths but its manufacturing base represents a far smaller share of output than in the 1960s. Rebuilding industrial depth is possible. It is not instantaneous.

In the 1960s the United States financed global commitments from a position of creditor strength and industrial dominance. Manufacturing formed a larger share of national output. Today a larger share of corporate profitability arises from finance and asset valuation.

Michael Hudson argued that once the dollar was decoupled from gold, American power increasingly relied on financial mechanisms rather than productive surpluses. Richard Wolff has framed imperial strain as emerging when financial extraction eclipses productive expansion. Radhika Desai argues that multipolarity arises from the rise of alternative centers of accumulation anchored in state directed production. This is not rhetorical defiance. It is material redistribution of productive capacity.

Energy is the binding variable. Rearmament, denial systems, and artificial intelligence are electricity intensive. Data centers consume power at scale measured in gigawatts. United States shale output has high decline rates requiring continuous reinvestment. Grid expansion faces permitting and infrastructure bottlenecks. China leads in solar module production, battery manufacturing, and several critical mineral processing chains. Energy Return on Investment differs across systems. In a world where computation, electrification, and industrial rearmament converge, energy capacity becomes structural leverage. Power is not only what you can design. It is what you can run.

Financial Centrality and Concentrated Exposure

Dollar centrality remains real. The currency dominates global reserves and settlement networks. Network effects reinforce liquidity. No alternative safe haven asset currently matches the scale and depth of United States Treasury markets. Capital controls limit renminbi reserve substitution. European fragmentation limits euro scale. Gold is not a complete reserve infrastructure.

Multipolarity in finance therefore does not imply replacement. It implies incremental fragmentation and hedging. Bilateral settlement in alternative currencies has expanded. States exposed to sanctions risk diversify marginally. The dollar remains central. Its dominance is no longer entirely uncontested.

Simultaneously, American capital markets have directed vast resources into artificial intelligence infrastructure. This concentration represents technological leadership. It also represents exposure. When equity valuation and strategic expectation concentrate heavily in a narrow cluster of firms and when data center demand accelerates energy strain, systemic sensitivity increases.

It is fashionable to argue that industrial mass matters less in an age of compute and autonomy. The opposite may be closer to the truth. Autonomy accelerates tempo. Tempo accelerates expenditure. Precision does not abolish magazines. It drains them faster. Intelligence heavy systems still rely on physical inventories such as interceptors, drones, airframes, chips, power generation, and logistics. Compute can widen advantage. It can also increase the speed at which industrial stocks are consumed.

Alliance geography still favors the United States. Forward bases, partners, and maritime chokepoints remain strategic assets. Yet under a mature denial environment geography becomes double edged. Concentrated infrastructure becomes targetable. The advantage of access converts into exposure. China does not need to replicate a global alliance system to shift structure. It needs to raise the operational cost of sustained presence inside the First Island Chain.

Critics argue that even if the near seas are denied, the United States retains command of the commons elsewhere. The issue is not global absence. It is permanent allocation. If dominance inside the Western Pacific requires continuous high intensity resource commitment, then structure shifts from permissive primacy to constrained balancing. The Western Pacific is not peripheral. It is central to global trade, semiconductor flows, and industrial supply chains.

The Inversion

Structure is not determined by managerial universality. It is determined by constraint.

If rivals can deny decisive victory in critical theatres, sustain that denial industrially, impose attritional cost through cost exchange asymmetry, and incrementally hedge financial exposure, the system is no longer frictionless.

The United States remains the most powerful state in aggregate capability. Its military, technological, and financial capacities remain unmatched in combination. Yet it now operates within missile envelopes, industrial pacing limits, rising debt service, energy intensity, and distributed production systems.

The unipolar moment did not vanish. It thinned. What emerges is not equal multipolar symmetry. It is constrained unipolarity evolving toward competitive industrial multipolarity.

The battlefield revealed it. The balance sheet reinforced it. Political economy explains it. Theory is adjusting to reality.