The concept of an emerging multipolar security order has been exaggerated. To be sure, power distributions and security challenges are changing. However, a shift toward multipolarity would require multiple regional hegemons each leading its own network of organizations, with each network operating on unique principles and interests. There would likely be significant friction and competition between the various networks. Alternatively, it would imply a genuinely collaborative and powerful global security order, but that exists only for certain issues like nuclear nonproliferation at a time when the United Nations Security Council has been largely defanged due to great-power competition. Thus, today’s institutional landscape is more bipolar or tripolar than multipolar — though with the United States clearly the single greatest security power, supported by allies even in the Trump era. Today’s world is more similar to that of the Cold War than to a genuinely multidimensional power distribution.

China and Russia are again aligned, albeit in different ways than in the Cold War (and with different goals back then). Iran and North Korea remain complex problems for the United States and its allies. China-led security institutions such as Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) are still not major players on the big issues of the day.