Geopolitical shifts in multipolar world: Experts discuss evolving global power dynamics

AMMAN — The 21st century already entered the middle of the third decade and we can summarise what was going on and what would be some geopolitical trends. Previous 25 years have been marked with economic crisis and political turmoil not only in the traditionally unstable Middle East but other parts of the world. 

In 2022, the biggest conventional war since the end of WW2 broke out in the European east between Russia and Ukraine. Meanwhile, from 2007 until now, Israel launched military campaigns against Palestinians in Gaza and in the West Bank whose aim is a genocide and ethnic cleansing. 

The far-right Israeli government does not hide its objective to physically remove Arabs from the Gaza Strip and the West Bank and to populate these territories with a new wave of the Zionist settlers.

"Shifting Paradigms: Emerging Powers and the New Multipolarity" was a panel jointly organised by Columbia Global Centres in Amman and Istanbul. The recently held platform gave a stage to professors and intellectuals who are trying to predict what will emerge from the current turbulence.

The title under which the scholars are meeting and audience will expect them to address right now in the current situation, there is a constant challenge of navigating between the big questions that they know should be focused on, noted Professor of History Adam Tooze from Columbia University.

Tooze added that the big picture question that they thought they should start the conversation with is the question of multipolarity.

"The difficulty that the US is having in adjusting to a more multipolar world is crucial to understanding tensions that dominate the US policy. Those [tensions] affect every side of the American policy debate," noted Tooze, adding that in fact the Democratic political elite that has a harder time accommodating itself to a truly complex multipolar world.

Europe underestimated the extent to which core elements of policy around Obama actually reflected rather a sober assessment of the diminishing power of the US.

"My sense is that we've been living in the sequence of Trump, Biden, Trump trough a kind of double atavism in a sense of return, or a rather simplistic Atlanticist unipolar world with Biden sandwiched between the crudity and the violence of the Trump vision on either side," Tooze elaborated.

For a Turkish panelist Soli Ozel, the unipolar world is over and now there are other international economic and political centres. Ozel, who is professor of International Relations at Kadir Has in Istanbul, maintains that roles of China and Russia became more significant in 21st century and it directly affects a unipolar world from 1990s.

"For reasons of its own mistakes, the US lost lot of its power and lot of prestige. Although it's quite remarkable that the US with only 4 per cent of the world's population, 80 years after the end of WW2, the rise of Europe, Japan, China, India and all the rest still is 24-25 per cent of the world's economy," Ozel underlined.

The professor added that a relative decline does not mean that one is absolved of responsibilities to mitigate that decline and actually to manage it.

The world will face the obsession of America to maintain its primacy in the international arena, Ozel said, noting that foreign policy has held, particularly after the WW2.

"What is remarkable about our time is not only challengers that are China and Russia as revisionist powers but asymmetric multipolarity," Ozel explained, adding that the current system is the system of hedgers. 

On the other hand, using multipolar paradigm for the world is only partially useful because what we see from the Middle East is that changes are global, regional and national, underlined Rami Khouri, a distinguished fellow of the American University in Beirut and former editor-in-chief of The Jordan Times.

"The new phenomenon is that nation states that fragment within them and a new sovereignty and new power centre emerges, which impacts the region," Khouri underlined, adding that the second one is fraying and disappearance of impactful global institutions.

“The third is the triumph of several global centres but the triumph what Reagan and Thacher set off in 1980s as materialistic capitalism that is sheltered and promoted by global deregulated markets,” Khouri underscored.

He noted that the global capitalist spree is bringing prosperity to many people, super prosperity to a few people and growing poverty to a lot of people.

"What we've seen in Gaza in the last 18th months and many years before indicates that era of imperialism never ended," Khouri stressed, adding that imperial, colonial rules that governed the world since Napoleonic times still dominate.

"Because of Gaza, because of excesses of the Israeli and American actions we witness the resistance all around the Global South and many parts of the Global North," Khouri pointed out.

"Mega in the US is essentially a form of borrowing the China rejuvenation of the nation playbook and to understand that we are going to this shift, we have to understand domestical dynamics in the US and China," said Ahmed Aboudouh, an associate fellow of the Chatham House Middle East and North Africa programme.

Aboudouh added that the world is dealing with the most significant two powers-the US and China.

Inclination towards centralisation is a trend that Aboudouh underlined, sidelining possible opposition.

"The ongoing weakening of Europe is based on achieving objective of trying to pressure Europe to relocate its industrial base into the US and to invest more into the US to reach Trumps geopolitical objective," Aboudouh underlined.