Trump’s dangerous unipolar mindset

I tell my students that they are lucky to be studying international relations at such a fascinating time. After all, there’s little argument that the international order is in a moment of transition, much like it was when I was an undergraduate studying political science at UCLA from 1988-1991.

As the Cold War came to an abrupt, anticlimactic end, we were left with what Charles Krauthammer labeled the “Unipolar moment.” The United States was the only superpower left standing.

To this American student, the moment felt triumphal but also bewildering. My peers, and many of our parents, had never known a world without the U.S.-USSR bipolarity of the Cold War. I try to convey this to my students today, but then, they’ve never known a world without the U.S. primacy.

The 9/11 attacks happened just a decade after the Cold War ended. There was an outpouring of solidarity with the U.S. and support for the War with Afghanistan which marked the only time NATO’s article 5 has been invoked. The UN Security Council authorized it. This marked a high point of U.S. power in the world.

But then, blinded by this unipolar mindset, George W. Bush, gravely overestimated U.S. power as he got into a war with Iraq. There was no NATO Article 5 or UN Security Council resolution and, more importantly, there were minimal allies involved (including Spain). The people of the world recognized this overreach and took to the streets. You might remember when about 1.5 million people poured onto the Castellana on February 15, 2003, to protest Spain’s involvement.

In a heartbeat, the U.S. went from an admired power (however grudgingly) to the focus of global ire. To be fair, some people supported Bush and his war. Nonetheless, this war brought on a massive hit to U.S. legitimacy and soft power while at the same time weakening international institutions. The UN was revealed as toothless as it lacked any authority to stop this conflict.

The unipolar moment started to wane and the only reason why the U.S. remained on top was that Russia was still weak and China was still rising.

Just 13 years later, Donald Trump built his political identity around being an outsider, punctuating his argument with a sharp critique of the War with Iraq. Most Republicans defended the Iraq war (or kept their mouths shut), yet during a 2016 Republican debate, Trump was blunt, “Obviously, the war in Iraq was a big, fat mistake.”

It came as a relief that Trump avoided large-scale military interventions and nation-building projects during his first administration. During the 2020 campaign, he continued to say that he would avoid the kinds of foreign entanglements Bush got into and in 2024 went so far as to call himself the peace candidate.

Yet, just one year into his second administration, Trump joined Israel in launching a war with Iran. Like Bush, he is blinded by a unipolar mindset and unshakable belief that U.S. military might will always prevail.

The conflicts with Iraq and now Iran have their own set of circumstances but there are some striking similarities. Both include a “preemptive” justification related to weapons of mass destruction. Both are lacking in national and international institutional legitimacy. Both involve U.S. leaders being lured into believing in the infallibility of U.S. military superiority only to quickly find out how this superiority doesn’t always translate into an easy win.

Both have exposed the danger of the unipolar mindset.

But there is also a critical difference: 23 years after the start of the Iraq War, the U.S. is no longer an unrivaled superpower at the top of a unipolar moment.

So, if this unipolar moment is over, then aren’t we now in a multipolar world?

Not so fast.

It’s tempting to jump on the multipolar bandwagon but let’s look at it more carefully. Joseph Nye provides a useful framework for exploring the complexities of international power via the three-dimensional chess board.

On the top board is military power. The U.S. continues to dominate, however, China is narrowing that gap, and Russia continues to wield a considerable nuclear arsenal. This complicates any claim of unipolarity.

Then we move on to the middle board: economic muscle. The current three heavyweights are the U.S., China and the European Union. We might call this multi-polar, but this state-centric term belies how power is stretched across states, multinational corporations, international institutions and markets.

Finally, the lower board is where states lose the monopoly on power and influence. This is the growing complexity of transnational issues, such as climate, pandemics, terrorism or migration and non-state actors, such as NGOs, corporations or criminal networks. Here, power is networked and diffuse.

The bottom two chessboards show why the term multipolar is too simplistic. International power is no longer the sole domain of states, instead, we might call it diffuse, which is a fuzzier term, but it better characterizes the reality of power circulating among multiple actors, levels, and issues.

We can argue over when exactly the unipolar moment ended and what we should call this current, post-unipolar world, but the more important question is whether policymakers, both in the U.S. and around the world have been able to recognize and adapt to this new reality.

Trump’s bombast, threats and military action show just how dangerously out of touch he is with the current state of the world. And so do the leaders who continue to kowtow to him, although many seem to be finally coming to their senses and ditching the flattery.

This kind of delusional thinking causes leaders like Trump to make military miscalculations that drag us into conflicts that serve no strategic purpose. Yet, they have enormous knock-on effects for all of us, disrupting global energy markets and trade routes, alliances and diplomatic relationships.

These effects are a stark reminder that power in today’s world is diffuse and interconnected. The real danger is not that the unipolar moment ended, but that too many leaders continue to behave as though it never did. The unipolar moment has faded, but the mindset persists.

This is the English version of my column, La Globalista, in El Español.