Russian Defiance Could Lead To A Multipolar World
OilPrice.com
Sun, 01 March 2015
Russia’s recent defiance of the United States and NATO has convinced some analysts that we now live in a multipolar world. Sunil Dasgupta, however, isn’t so sure. For such a world to exist, India and China must side with Russia in its confrontation with the West. That’s something they remain reluctant to do, at least openly.
One of the lasting questions in post-Cold War international relations has been the enduring preponderance of the United States as the sole remaining superpower. The Realist School of thought, which was predicated in significant measure on the idea of the balance of power, failed to explain why other nations did not rise or come together to balance the United States. To explain the discrepancy, die-hard realists such as Robert Pape of the University of Chicago proposed the idea of a transitional period of ‘soft’ or ‘hidden’ balancing by countries such as Russia, China, and even Europe before a period of hard balancing returned.
Russia’s ability to defy the United States and other Western powers in Ukraine (as well as Moscow’s support of the Syrian and Iranian regimes) since late 2013 has suggested that the period of soft balancing is over. The return of traditional balance of power politics implies that a multipolar world, in which the United States is one of many similarly positioned great powers, may have arrived.
If the road to multipolarity runs through Ukraine, however, not everyone is seeing the same view en route. On the one hand, it is clear that Russia has been able to use economic interdependence, modern technology, and a proxy war strategy to resist the United States and other Western powers. On the other, the dangers of overreach are all too evident. Russia is on the precipice of alienating Europe, revitalizing NATO, and bankrupting itself if energy prices remain low.
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