By Arta Moeini, Institute for Peace & Diplomacy, 4/9/26

Dr. Arta Moeini is Managing Director of U.S. Operations and Director of Research at the Institute for Peace & Diplomacy.

Introduction

Few concepts in contemporary international relations are invoked as often, or with as little precision, as ‘multipolarity’. The term has become a universal description for the transition away from unipolarity and Pax Americana, more generally, yet it conceals more than it reveals. Beneath its surface lies the deeper reality of a civilisational shift—an epochal transformation not merely in the distribution of power but in the very conception of world order. The modern system that arose from the Enlightenment and was consolidated under Western hegemony after the Second World War is now dissolving, and with it, the universalist assumptions that shaped the collective understanding of politics, progress, and peace.

That postwar regime, popularised as “rules-based” or liberal international order (LIO), is facing a total reckoning, or to quote Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a “rupture” that is world historical.¹ While the liberal and legalistic framing of the postwar order helped mask the logic of power and the reality of Western globalism for decades, that illusion has now been shattered by the socio-political discontents of neoliberal global integration, the re-centring of the world’s key regions as autonomous geostrategic theaters in their own right, and the relative decline (and identity crisis) of the United States as the LIO’s principal guarantor and enforcer.

Embodying a secular iteration of a universalist Christian worldview, the LIO initially supported by both the Soviet Union and the United States—promoted an ideological and humanist view of international relations that was not only artificial and performative but also instrumentalised post-Enlightenment European ideas like democracy, human rights, and international law to formalise Allied victory into permanent global management. It aimed to legitimise the postwar order under the guise of sovereign equality while hiding the true reality of Western global dominance.²

As a product of the 20th century, the LIO discarded the openly imperial, racial, and martial language that had characterised Western hegemony in the 18th and 19th centuries, repackaging hegemony behind an ideational veneer and lofty aspirations, with a (racially-diverse and international) class of liberal internationalists and Atlanticists gradually replacing the Anglo-Saxons and the WASPs as its core managerial elite. As a result, this order minimised the lasting importance of power politics through a comforting (if flawed) fiction of a One World (cf. the “global village”) unified through the Second World War as its shared founding myth: while downplaying the structures of power and control, this contrived ontology also decentred the world’s natural diversity and the reality of global cultural plurality in an attempt to normalise its underlying universalist tendencies and desire for global homogeneity.³

The international order of the modern age rested on three intertwined paradigms: the liberal, the national, and the global. Philosophically speaking, each carried within it the same metaphysical presumption—that humanity could be ordered, engineered even, according to a single, rational, and universal model. Liberalism sought to universalise moral norms around Enlightenment ideals, nationalism to universalise the political form of the modern state tied to popular sovereignty, and globalism to universalise the world itself as a single, coherent system (both normatively and economically). Together, they consolidated the modern spirit into an ideational architecture, forming the superstructure of modernity. That structure, once sustained by hegemonic power, is now collapsing under its own contradictions. The “Rupture”, or what this author has called the Great Transition, marks this turning point, underscoring the return of history amid the human need for rootedness and difference.⁴

From this perspective, the emerging order is not a simple rearrangement of global power, but a reconstitution of political life around deeper and older units of human association: civilisations. It signals the reassertion of cultural sovereignty, the revival of regional orders centred on spheres of interest, and the restoration of multiplicity as the natural condition of humanity.

The Discontents of Modernity and the Myth of the Global

The universalist ambition of modernity was to dominate nature, obfuscate reality, and transcend history—to dissolve the multiplicity of civilisations into an integrated political and moral world governed by human reason, commerce, and shared norms and institutions. This was the promise of the “end of history”, modernity’s fatal conceit.⁵ The assumption that humanity could be unified under a single moral and political order denied the evolutionary reality of human plurality: that societies develop through distinct cultural complexes and civilisational traditions, each embodying its own distinctive vision of order, the good, and life itself.⁶

The world was never “one”; it was always a plurality of distinct regional spheres (a “pluriverse”) with different geographies, normative horizons, and forms of life. As jurist and political theorist Carl Schmitt correctly observed, “The political world is a pluriverse, not a universe…the political entity cannot by its very nature be universal in the sense of embracing all of humanity and the entire world.”⁷ This inherent multiplicity in human political and normative life would inevitably produce multiple, competing, and bounded “spatial orders” and “greater spaces” (Großräume) that would resist a single international legal or political regime.⁸

Yet the globalist bias that has permeated all modern paradigms—even those professing to be realist—treated the Earth as a single, interconnected, and rather mechanical system. It mistook the local as the universal and redefined security, order, and meaning not as particular civilisational achievements but as global constructs to be imposed on all. This mentality, rooted in the modern will to homogenise, produced both the alienation and the quest for recognition that have characterised our era.⁹

As realist scholar Christopher Mott explains, the ultimate blind spot for the postwar approaches to international relations is their failure to realise that, “Rather than a single international system that one nation could lead or dominate in a zero-sum fashion, the world is actually made up of multiple overlapping and different systems (in the plural sense) [emphasis in original] that are regionally defined.”¹⁰

The collapse of the postwar order and its “rules” is therefore not a temporary crisis but a long-brewing reckoning with the contradictions of modernity itself. From the United Nations (UN) to human rights, postwar institutions and values are increasingly ceremonial or exist only in form; their legitimacy has evaporated, and they lack genuine enforcement mechanisms. By underscoring the inherent anarchy of international politics, the wars in Ukraine and Gaza are emblematic of this disintegration, exposing the limits of an order that once promised peace through abstract universality but instead delivered instability due to its hypocrisy, hubris, and hegemonic drive.¹¹

The Epochal Break: Post-Liberal, Post-National, Post-Global

The unravelling of postwar globalism marks a historical watershed more significant than the inevitable end of unipolarity. The modern state, the liberal subject, and the global system are all outgrowths of the same modernistic metaphysical impulse: the will to unify, standardise, and homogenise through systematic atomisation. Despite its technological facades, modernity is a form of theology with an insatiable appetite for converts, and, ultimately, our era of general discontent is fuelled by a crisis of faith in modernity and its paradigms. What is emerging in the wake of this collapse is not a simple return to classical Westphalian balance-of-power politics but the birth of a new paradigm—one that is post-liberal, post-national, post-global, and decidedly multi-nodal.¹²

The post-liberal orientation reflects the reaffirmation of multiplicity and the exhaustion of moral universalism. The liberal project’s claim to embody universal truths and a timeless code of humanist values has been undermined by its selective application and transformation into a tool of domination, not to mention the reemergence of contested interpretations of human virtue across various civilisations, including within the West itself.¹³

The post-national turn marks the precarity of the modern Westphalian system—a byproduct of internecine European conflicts and colonial expansion. The modern nation-state is hardly a natural form of human community but an ideological construct in which long-dormant sectarian fault lines, such as ethnicity or religion, were propagandised and instrumentalised to break up the once sizeable Eurasian empires and render them vulnerable to Western imperialism. Its proliferation under Wilsonian nationalism¹⁴ fragmented and balkanised older civilisational spaces and imposed a uniform political model upon profoundly different peoples and cultures.¹⁵ 

Under the cover of national self-determination and freedom, the Wilsonian model (cf. League of Nations) abstracted and reified a “people” to form new, smaller “democratic” republics. Under the pretext of resisting capitalism and emancipating the people from the bourgeoisie worldwide, Vladimir Lenin and the Soviets did the same in their own domain, effectively promoting nation-states as “socialist” republics within their internationalist framework.

Regardless of their adopted ideology, most of these artificial republics have enjoyed the veneer of sovereignty and autonomy. Still, their rhetoric of “self-determination” notwithstanding, they have, in practice, become thoroughly dependent on Western powers and entrenched in the liberal, United States (US)-dominated international order, advancing the global reach of modernity. Since 1991, modern nation-states like Ukraine have been the perfect tool to advance cosmopolitanism in the name of democracy and progress: far too weak to resist the onslaught of Western capitalism and globalisation, yet just strong enough (with foreign backing) to disrupt historical geopolitical anchors in their region and prevent civilisational and region-wide integration. As such, the nation-state system, far from guaranteeing stability, has become a vessel of fragmentation, moral confusion, and geopolitical conflict.

The post-global attitude represents the end of modernity’s greatest illusion: that the world forms a single, coherent system of politics and morality. The new epoch restores politics to its natural scale—the regional and the civilisational—and reaffirms difference as the foundation of order rather than its negation. Often organised as Middle Powers, the world’s great cultures and civilisations—Indic, Euro-Atlantic, Japanese, Chinese, Persian, Russian, Turkish, and Arab—are both geographically and historically contingent and enduring modes of being, sacred yet dynamic worlds with their own outlooks and internal logics.¹⁶ They are older and more resilient than the modern, artificial nation-state and are more deeply rooted than the ephemeral global institutions that have sought to control and govern them.

It follows that liberal internationalism was always predicated on a fiction: that universal moral norms could be detached from cultural foundations, that a single civilisation’s historical experience could stand in for humanity as a whole. Such a project could endure only by American power and an abstractly universalist, if not missionary and apocalyptic, moral narrative (further bolstered by unipolarity). Thus, as American global dominance has waned, the universalist edifice it upheld has also crumbled, revealing the plural, unequal, and culturally diverse reality of the world beneath it.

The emerging global landscape is characterised not merely by multipolarity but by a multi-nodal configuration—an intricate constellation of civilisational hubs and regional systems existing concurrently without a substantively unified organising principle. All conventional modern ideologies and theories, including neorealism, exhibit a (Eurocentric) bias toward totality and ontological certainty—the presumption that security, prosperity, and legitimacy should be interpreted within a global framework rooted in fixed philosophical categories derived from modern Western philosophy.

However, borrowing the terminology of Japan’s Kyoto School, the new epoch repudiates this idealistic logic in favour of a “world-of-worlds” or a “multi-world,” wherein the formless and indeterminate emptiness (ku) of global space functions as the fabric or topological field (ba) for the concrete, creative, and authentic becoming of sui generis cultural worlds.¹⁷ By supplanting the totalising logic of the ideal with the concrete yet fluid logic of place, the post-unipolar world order thus realigns politics with its inherent scale: the civilisational and the regional.

Rejecting Bloc-Thinking and the New Manichaeism

In this transitional moment, many observers and policymakers have sought comfort in old paradigms. They would prefer to resurrect the familiar moral geography of the Cold War, casting the world once again into binary opposition: democracies versus autocracies, civilisation versus barbarism, the free world versus the axis of evil. These narratives share a Manichaean impulse—the need to impose moral clarity upon a world that no longer conforms to Western certainties.

Such dualisms are dogmatic, intellectually sterile, and strategically dangerous. They deny the complexity of the emerging world and reproduce the ideological rigidity that once plunged humanity into decades of containment, proxy conflict, and moral absolutism. The rhetoric of a “new Cold War” resurrects precisely the globalist and hegemonic mindset that the world is now outgrowing: a belief that security and legitimacy can only be achieved through global struggle between rival camps, rather than through dialogue, coexistence, and regional balances of power.¹⁸

This attitude also reflects a deeper anxiety within the declining liberal order. Unable to conceive of geo-cultural plurality and power politics without exceptionalism, moral absolutes, and permanent global hegemony, the waning Atlanticist establishment must reframe every assertion of cultural sovereignty or regional autonomy as a threat to “democracy” or “civilisation” itself. In this way, it conceals its own parochialism under the guise of universalism. Yet the moral authority of such claims has dissolved. Given the double standards in Gaza and Ukraine, the non-Western world no longer accepts that legitimacy flows from conformity to Western liberal ideals. A truly posthegemonic world will necessarily transcend such binary thinking and the coercive moralism it entails.

The new age demands the opposite: the cultivation of cultural realism, which accepts that (global) pluralism, (local) hierarchies, and contestation in human communities are not pathologies to be overcome. Rather, they are the normal conditions of human coexistence from whose dynamic interaction within specific territories emerge our various cultural complexes. As such, reducing the world into two antagonistic global blocs fails to reflect reality. It belongs to the past, and even then, it was always an aberration. The future lies not in the reconstitution of hostile ideological camps but in fostering a modus vivendi among distinct civilisational powers—a practical (valueneutral) ethic of coexistence grounded in restraint, reciprocity, strategic empathy, and mutual recognition.¹⁹

Cultural Realism and the Civilisational Foundation of Order

Cultural realism begins from an ontological premise: civilisations—not nation-states, international institutions, or individuals—are the fundamental and enduring units of human political life at the global level.²⁰ Rooted in a particular geography and organic cultural evolution, each civilisation constitutes a unique, albeit dynamic, normative and historical world with its own internal coherence—a distinctive vision of order, justice, virtue, and even reality within specified boundaries.

This civilisational world order is neither static nor universal, and the civilisations that comprise it—contrary to the Huntingtonian thesis²¹ —are neither essentialised categories abstracted from history and untethered from geography, nor reducible to religions destined for permanent hostility.²² Real-world civilisations are complex organisms, internally diverse, and telluric. They rise and fall, engaging in strategic competition with neighbouring realms over resources and territory. Nonetheless, given their multiplicity and continued historical survival, a natural balance exists among them despite disparities in power and size. As such, during normal periods, the order tends to favour an equilibrium that sustains global stability at any given epoch, without a global hegemon or enforcer. From a cultural realist perspective, therefore, the world is—strictly speaking—anarchic and rejects formal laws and structures; however, an underlying order—rooted in geography and historical continuity—persists, preventing both convergence and worldwide chaos.²³

The civilisational nature of the inter-state order reflects the reality of human life as a political, agonistic, and cultural animal. The civilisational order emerges from history and human cultural evolution as the natural global condition that mediates humankind’s inter-civilisational political conflicts. Given the incommensurability of civilisations, this global order neither prescribes nor is it based on universal morality. Still, it has a set of informal rules—an ethic derived from a heuristic process and millennia of diplomatic practice. Here are seven of the more fundamental of these realist principles, stemming from diplomatic history and the real-world requirements of inter-state relations:

1

Ontological Pluralism: Humanity consists of multiple civilisations, each a law unto itself, incommensurable, and irreducible to the others.

2

Cultural Sovereignty: Every civilisational state fights to order its moral and political life according to its own traditions and ways of life.

3

Regional Primacy: Global stability is best maintained by powers anchored in their civilisational spheres, rather than by transregional superpowers intervening to disrupt regional balances of power.

4

Realpolitik and Sovereign Realism: All civilisational states aim to maximise their security by aggregating power, prioritising their vital interests, and attempting to establish or maintain their sphere of influence in their respective regions.

5

Strategic Restraint: While war and conflict are inescapable, all powers benefit from recognising the geo-cultural limits of their spheres of influence and refraining from transregional ideological, religious, and imperial projects that would disrupt the fragile global equilibrium and mobilise other civilisational states against them.

6

Modus Vivendi: Convergence and ideological proselytisation are a recipe for global war. Sustainable peace requires true coexistence achieved through dialogue and diplomacy that affirms global cultural pluralism and exhibits strategic empathy for the true red-lines of rival powers.

7

Diplomatic Concert: An informal, pragmatic arrangement for constructive engagement and conflict mediation based on mutual recognition that reflects the privileges of civilisational states and their higher share of global power and influence.

By recognising the civilisational basis of the global order and its inherent relationship with power, cultural realism thus provides a concrete alternative to both the idealism of liberal universalism and the nihilism of power politics detached from meaning and the authentic experience of human life—both of which, in different ways, universalise the world and reduce it to a zero-sum battle-space for global hegemony.

The Concert of Civilisations

A cultural-realist framework regards the desire for global hegemony and ideological conformity as irrational and ultimately destructive to both the world and the states pursuing it. Instead, it perceives self-contained regional conflicts at the civilisational fault lines and a global equilibrium among civilisations as the natural condition of international politics, in the absence of the universalist compulsions of ideology and religion.

The practical expression of this worldview is not a rigid alliance system or a new universal organisation, but an informal concert of civilisations: a flexible architecture of coexistence among leading civilisational and regional powers. By promoting dialogue, non-interference, and mutual recognition, such a concert could sustain global stability without recourse to hegemony or an all-out war. Each civilisational power would exercise primacy in its region, assuming responsibility for upholding order and security in its own sphere while respecting the total autonomy of others. By adhering to realpolitik and sovereign realism while leveraging the balance of power through prudent diplomacy, these keystone states would manage the inevitable agonism of international life without recourse to global ideological crusades that could trigger nuclear armageddon.

The upshot would not be global disorder or power vacuums, but a pragmatic, peaceful coexistence (i.e., modus vivendi) that carefully preserves a pluralistic equilibrium—a world governed by tacit understandings rather than imposed universal values, by recognition rather than conceit, coercion, or convergence. The logic of containment, moral crusades, bloc-formation, and permanent alliances like NATO would give way to the more enduring logic of global coexistence.²⁴ In this sense, the coming order may prove not merely post-liberal and post-global, but decidedly post-ideological: an age that has learned from the exhaustion of both utopian cosmopolitanism and myopic nationalism and no longer abides Western parochialism.²⁵

Modelled on the 19th-century Concert of Europe,²⁶ its 21st-century iteration would accept hierarchy and differentiation as natural features of human existence: it would not aspire for universal and perpetual peace but for durable stability built on realism.²⁷ Interstate conflicts and disputes would remain, but they would be managed through the Concert and stopped from escalating into a global cataclysm. Such realism may appear modest by utopian standards of modernity, yet it is profoundly humane—for it is rooted in the tragic wisdom that peace among the many is only possible when no single power or ideology seeks to speak and decide for all.

The American Question

For the US, the challenge of the Great Transition is existential. America must adapt to the new multi-nodal world and rediscover its place within it as a lasting great power. To achieve this, Washington must recognise that it will no longer be the sole “indispensable nation” but one node among many such states: it must refocus its attention domestically and prioritise the American people.

The temptation to revive containment—whether against China, Russia, or any other perceived adversary in the old world—must be resisted. The decades-long projects of global hegemony, moral supremacy, and international social engineering by US Machtpolitikers²⁸ (cf. Boltonians), liberal internationalists, and neoconservatives have bankrupted the country and hollowed out its industries and the middle class while depleting America’s spirit and its republican virtues.²⁹ A sustainable and earnest American foreign policy must embrace the wisdom of sovereign realism: the art of aligning national interest with strategic restraint, while prioritising the collective security of its sphere of interest (cf. Großräum) in the North American continent.³⁰

So far, President Donald Trump’s effort to manage this transition has been paradoxical: the Trump doctrine accepts the logic of regionalisation and sphere of influence without shedding the trappings of empire.³¹ It has aimed, through the “Donroe doctrine”—an economic reinterpretation of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe doctrine that redefines great-power politics as a zero-sum competition over resources, technological superiority, and economic power—to refocus America on policing the Western Hemisphere rather than the entire world. Yet, it has continued to rely on old tropes such as American exceptionalism, coercive diplomacy, unrestrained military power, and imperial hubris, all in the name of nationalism.

Adapting to the new 21st-century realities is not to retreat in fear but to evolve—to exchange the hubris of global hegemony and an unchecked national-security state for the dignity of sovereignty and prudent national interest rooted in common sense. In a multi-nodal world of great and middle powers, America’s future influence will not derive from its ability to police the world, subordinate others, or demand maximalist compliance, but from its willingness to serve as one civilisational pole among others—a cultural and political model grounded in its own traditions, no longer an avatar for rootless universalism or an empty vessel for liberalism seeking to remake the world in its image. To recover its own cultural sovereignty and historical particularity is to allow others the same privilege. Only then can genuine dialogue and reciprocity among civilisational powers take root.³²

Since its founding, America has drawn strength and vitality from its self-conception as a singular cultural and moral community: America was neither meant to be a typical empire, nor a propositional nation forcing an abstract project of global governance. A return to sovereign realism as espoused by George Washington—a foreign policy rooted in strategic prudence, non-alignment, military restraint, and national renewal—would enable the US to coexist peacefully and honourably with other major civilisational powers.³³ The power of its example, not its military might alone, could once more serve as a source of inspiration.

Conclusion: Toward a New Nomos of the Earth

The now-unfolding epoch marks the end of modernity’s metaphysical illusions—the belief in universal progress, a single rational order of humanity, and the possibility of a global moral community. The smooth, borderless globe imagined by liberal modernity has shattered into a rich, textured world of regions and civilisations, each bound to its own geography, historical memory, and rhythm of life. What is emerging is not disorder, but the reassertion of the natural nomos of the Earth: a spatial and civilisational plurality that modernity had sought to suppress by force and ideology. The process has reconnected politics with the realities of space and territory, revealing that politics is fundamentally telluric and concrete. It has animated a re-politicised world in which distinct peoples and cultural complexes reassert their sovereignty against the flattening abstractions of global modernity and demand recognition.

To describe these fundamental transformations as a shift toward multipolarity is to misunderstand their essence. Multipolarity still presupposes a single integrated system—a world of distinct and equal “poles” competing within a common framework.³⁴ The Great Transition is something deeper: the disintegration of that framework itself. Power is no longer organised within one systemic model but diffused across multiple, discrete, and semi-autonomous civilisational domains, each with its own organising principles, historical trajectory, and conception of order.

The new nomos of world politics is thus better described as multi-nodal: a constellation of overlapping regional systems and civilisational spaces coexisting without a central authority or universal laws. It signifies the end of both the liberal internationalist dream of global governance and the nationalist illusion of atomised sovereignty. The modern nation-state, once celebrated as the universal political form, now yields to larger, more organic units of order—civilisational blocs and regional anchors that draw legitimacy from historical depth and cultural continuity rather than from abstract legalism and self-righteous moralism.

This reterritorialisation and thickening of politics is not a regression but a return to reality. It is the repudiation of the flattened politics of modernity: the recognition that order is always plural and nuanced, that justice is particular and contingent on both place and history, and that peace can only emerge from maintaining equilibrium and modus vivendi among distinct forms of life. Power in such a world means the capacity to preserve order within one’s sphere—not to impose it upon others. Sovereignty acquires a deeper connotation: the right of every great civilisation to live according to its own law and to guard its own horizon of meaning.

The 21st century will, therefore, not be defined by global integration but by regionalism and differentiated coexistence across civilisations; not by ideological struggle for universality but by pragmatic balance and the art of realpolitik; not by the Manichaean confrontation of blocs but by a concert of civilisations offering mutual recognition. This civilisational order will ultimately replace the moral abstractions of modernity with a tragic realism attuned to the dangers of idealism, the permanence of conflict, and the limits of human agency to dominate and recast the world as it wishes: the looming post-modern age thus affirms multiplicity and geo-cultural particularity, marking the reemergence of space anchored by civilisations as the foundation of world order.

This is the new Nomos of the Earth: a multi-nodal world that, having cast off the metaphysical trappings of modernity, begins to embody, at last, the inherent plurality of humankind as its elemental condition and seeks within it—not beyond it—the measure of order and human greatness.