Multipolarity in a Multi‑Layered Cage
Why the shift from unipolarity did not break the imperial structure—and what still blocks the path to a more peaceful order
Note to Readers: This is Part I of a two‑part essay on the nature of the current multipolar order. In this opening piece, I will present to you what I call “elite‑competitive multipolarity”: a world where US unipolarity is finished but the underlying imperial structure is adapting, and where the rising powers are locked into a multi‑layered cage of interdependencies that none of them can exit. I trace the structural logic of hedging, the missing infrastructure of anti‑imperialism, and the constraints that bind even a socialist great power like China to the existing capitalist world‑economy.
In Part II, I will turn from diagnosis to the strategic landscape: the competing grand strategies, the problem of mass politics, the limits of civilizational discourse, the mixed‑economy possibility, and the difficult work of building something the empire cannot survive.
From the tensions in the Strait of Hormuz to the meetings between Xi and Putin, and Xi and Trump, alongside the overall decline of the US and Europe, the balance of power has shifted from the unipolar moment to a multipolar one. Yet, what does this shift actually mean? What will change, and what will stay the same? What makes this moment different from past transitions? And what kind of future do we even want?
In two recent interviews (Burning Archives and Liberation News Network) and in several notes (here, here, and, here), I have been developing a framework to help us understand this moment with a little more clarity. Of course, this builds on my past observations regarding the Bunker State and the Fragmentationist Grand Strategy. And perhaps, here lies the crux: the way the US-led empire and its transatlantic ruling strata operate has changed qualitatively, which means we, too, need to update the lens through which we view world events. Am I saying we are in for an unpleasant surprise? That the empire is invincible? No and no.
What I am saying is: the more things change, the more things stay the same.
A World of Hostages
The recent Xi-Trump and Xi-Putin summits in China were neither mere “nothingburgers” nor simple displays of unified strength by the anti-hegemonic bloc. Instead, they are reflections of a new reality where global interdependencies have been tacitly accepted by all sides as both a risk and an instrument. Multipolarity has been accepted as a fait accompli by everyone.
Indeed, the recent China-US summit needs to be read through a different lens than “China wins / US loses” or a “new Cold War détente.” What it really shows is how deeply both countries are locked into a structural interdependence they cannot easily shed, and how the US, as a bunkerizing empire, is trying to adapt its strategy of containment to this new reality of multipolarity.
Structural Dependency & “Mutually Assured Denial”
This adaptation is necessary precisely because a clean break is nearly impossible. At its core, the US and China remain bound by a profound structural dependency. They are each other’s irreducible systemic risks and systemic stabilizers (trade, finance, tech, supply chains, “energy gatekeepers” in some regards). Neither can “decouple” without triggering damaging shocks.
To see this dynamic clearly, let’s look at a remarkably explicit Brookings paper from 2014 called “Fueling a New Disorder? The New Geopolitical and Security Consequences of Energy Project on International Order and Strategy.“ There is a very good reason this paper emerged in 2014—tied to the US shale and fracking revolution, though that is a topic for another essay—but the geopolitical calculus it lays out is fascinating. It is worth quoting this section in full:
“Can the United States and China (and India) forge a new basic geo-political deal—trading some form of balance of power in Asia for some form of condominium of power in the Gulf? That will be a central question—perhaps the central question—in U.S. strategy in the coming years.
At its core, this U.S.-China bargain would have two elements. First, in the East and South China Sea, the United States and China must each recognize that the other has no intention of fading away or giving ground. The United States will retain a major presence and stake in open seas around China’s shores; and China will build its naval capacity to ensure that it can’t be subject to an economic or energy blockade by sea. Through a combination of negotiations and evolving realities, the United States and China could reach an understanding that could be described as ‘mutually assured denial’—that is, the United States recognizes that China will develop enough naval capacity to stop the U.S. from blockading the sea lanes, and China recognizes that the United States is not going to be pushed out of those waters. Much of this would occur through mutual signaling rather than through explicit negotiation.”
This passage is interesting not so much for the specific details of what the US wants to trade, but because it accepts multipolarity in function. If we generalize the argument, it means neither side can push the other out of critical strategic domains (the Western Pacific, energy sea lanes, key chokepoints) without triggering catastrophic costs. The US-led ruling elite must accept that China will build enough naval capacity to prevent a blockade in its surrounding waters, while China must accept that the US is not going to simply withdraw its forward presence.
Each side has enough capability to prevent the other from fully dominating or blockading, but not enough to expel the other. That is “mutually assured denial”—a logic that can easily be expanded into other domains. I wouldn’t take the paper’s exact scenario as literal reality, but it reveals exactly how a significant portion of the US security policy class thinks. They are not thinking in terms of exiting Asia, but in terms of renegotiating a stable configuration of mutual constraint, one where Washington maintains its military presence and remains the indispensable military “organizer” of key regions with China’s tacit acceptance.
Why is this so revealing? Because it proves that the US security apparatus has fully grasped the material reality of multipolarity—and is actively designing avenues to survive it. This brings us to a crucial distinction: the different variants of multipolarity.
Two Ideal-Types of Multipolarity
If the US security apparatus and with it the US-led imperial core are actively adapting to multipolarity rather than collapsing under it, we have to recognize a massive conceptual blind spot in how we talk about geopolitics today. We register that power is becoming more dispersed across the globe, but we mistakenly assume the underlying imperial logic must therefore be weakening. This is why I always emphasize: do not confuse a change in the distribution of power with a change in the logic of the system. To understand the current moment—and to imagine a viable future—we need clarity about which kind of multipolarity we are living through, and what other forms are even conceivable. I’ll sketch two ideal‑types. Reality is a shifting continuum between them, but the contrast helps expose exactly what is—and is not—changing.
Anti-Imperialist Multipolarity
If we had what I call anti‑imperialist multipolarity—a type of multipolarity where the empire, and the system it feeds on, is gone or nearly gone—we would probably see genuine sovereign equality, the erosion of core–periphery extraction, and real social power for subalterns. In such a multipolar world, global finance would be fundamentally reconfigured: either “world money” would be fully de‑weaponized, or clearing systems would be designed to protect weaker states from all cores, not just from one of them. Coercion through money, law, and infrastructure would be structurally ruled out, not just selectively restrained. The transnational imperial class project would be dissolved; aggression would be constrained by enforceable norms and a process of reparative justice. Property and key infrastructures would be socialized or radically constrained so that they cannot be used as instruments of domination.
Elite-Competitive Multipolarity (Current Default)
By contrast, what I call elite‑competitive multipolarity is, I would argue, the current default. Here we have something like a twenty‑first‑century Concert of Great Powers: a balance of power among different countries’ ruling strata, each managing its own sphere. In this multipolar world, the financial sphere would be organized around several centres of finance and commodity pricing, but all anchored in the same basic logic—dollar equivalents, highly mobile capital, and the use of debt and sanctions as routine tools of statecraft by some. Such a world is fully compatible with a transnational, US‑led empire. The empire survives as a network of bunker states and competing cores. Organized violence is normalized through proxy wars, grey‑zone operations and spheres of influence; ruling classes arbitrate between blocs, sometimes shifting allegiance, but remaining entrenched.
The gap between these two poles—what we have and what we might want—is the conceptual blind spot. It is filled, most of the time, by the assumption that the shift toward multipolarity is automatically a shift toward the first type. The rest of this essay is an argument against that assumption.
Elite-Competitive Multipolarity in Practice
The current global condition is a historically new condition of mutual vulnerability borne out of a structure of interdependence that multiple sides are consciously managing. Thus, we are not witnessing a replay of bipolar Cold War summits, because there are no two opposed systems with ideological “outsides.” There is currently no alternative system—not even in an embryonic form—attempting to manage and organize society and the economy under a different logic. The isolated pockets that do exist are simply too few and show little interest in creating such “outsides”—or else they are under permanent siege, lacking the material capacity to build one even if they wanted to.
What we do have instead are several powers bargaining over shares, rules, and spheres within one late-capitalist world-system. Even forums like BRICS and projects like the BRI are deeply integrated into and interdependent with this system. This does not preclude these initiatives from meaningfully improving people's lives, but it is a far cry from the structural dynamics of the Cold War—which was an attempt to build something fundamentally different to challenge the empire itself.
The unipolar moment is over, and there will be no simple reassertion of unipolar command by the US-led empire; Washington understands exactly what has happened. For the Western elite, however, multipolarity is accepted strictly as a material reality, not a normative good—by which I mean a system built on genuine sovereign equality and shared rule-making. Instead, we have an imperial core fully aware that it no longer enjoys overwhelming, incontestable superiority across all key domains, and that it cannot restore that dominance by force alone without catastrophic overreach. We are also not dealing with a 1914-style situation where great powers are “sleepwalking into war” or scrambling for new colonies. Beijing and Moscow are not launching a global revolution; they are seeking relative autonomy and maneuver room. They want to survive within the structures that already exist.
On the other hand, the United States seeks to actively shape this multipolarity to preserve its core global hierarchies. Rather than retreating, Washington is fighting to maintain its strategic military command across key global theaters and anchor global wealth within dollarized, US-policed financial networks. This strategy relies on the continuous expansion of NATO-compatible hybrid warfare architectures—or regional variants like what we might see in Latin America like the "Shield of the Americas"—while locking the global economy into transatlantic technological and regulatory standards. Crucially, the empire maintains a system where its allies, proxies, and dominions perceive US “security guarantees” as irreplaceable, effectively turning these “protections” into a permanent geopolitical bargaining chip to enforce obedience.
Interdependence as Both Risk and Instrument
To protect these hierarchies in an era where direct conquest is no longer feasible, the empire must manipulate the very global ties that bind it to its rivals. This is where we see the structural logic of interdependence functioning simultaneously as both a risk and an instrument. Recent developments, like the US-China agricultural deal and the creation of new boards of trade and investment, make this logic tangible. Every actor in the world-system understands that economic integration is a profound risk; each side is acutely aware of its exposure to sudden shocks in trade, food, energy, or technology, dictated by their respective structural positions in the global economy. Yet, precisely because these vulnerabilities exist, interdependence is weaponized as an instrument of statecraft. These deeply entangled economic, financial, and logistical ties are then no longer just pathways for cooperation but something else:
So when Washington and Beijing partially restore, say, agricultural imports or ease some chip export rules, we should understand this as a re‑wiring of interdependence in a way that creates mutual hostages—farmers, companies, logistics chains, local elites—who have a stake in preventing a complete rupture, while both sides continue to harden their positions in more strategic sectors (AI, semiconductors, rare earths, military applications).
That is “efficiency” in the bunker‑state sense: you spread the costs and risks, you integrate your rival just enough to stabilize the system and gain leverage, but you keep escalation tools in reserve (and keep developing these tools of coercion). The tech war, chip restrictions, sanctions architecture, and gray-zone operations (energy disruptions, economic strangulation, infrastructure sabotage, attempts at infiltration, intelligence operations, etc.) will continue uninterrupted.
Why This Moment Differs
Our current situation looks much closer to elite‑competitive multipolarity than to any anti‑imperialist version. This is not because the specific infrastructure that existed during the Cold War—Bandung, the Non‑Aligned Movement, the Tricontinental Conference—that made even an embryonic anti‑imperialist multipolarity possible has largely disappeared.
It is precisely against this loss of institutional tissue that Lenin’s theory of imperialism becomes so instructive. For Lenin, dismantling a global and imperial system of extraction was never just a matter of changing the distribution of power among states; it required a three-fold foundation: a shared political horizon, an organized transnational force, and mass movements capable of structural change. Today, all three of these components are missing.
There is, first, no shared vision of a post‑imperial world—no common horizon around which states and movements might converge. The dominant language now is “civilizational diversity” and sovereignty. This is important for resisting Western lecturing, but it says nothing about how societies and economies might be reorganized at another level. It is a vocabulary of coexistence and rightly so, but it is not of transformation.
Gone, too, is anything resembling an international network that could coordinate strategy across borders in the way the Comintern once did. Today’s forums—BRICS, the SCO, the G20—are interstate coordination clubs, while the alternative institutions that do exist, like CIPS or the BRICS Bank, are complementary to the world market, not replacements for its underlying logic. More precisely, no parallel infrastructure is being built on a non‑capitalist and, hence, non‑imperial basis.
And the third absence is perhaps the most consequential: mass movements with transformational power and political awareness. During the Cold War, ordinary people were mobilized—however imperfectly—into organizations that linked local struggles to a global horizon. Today, international outreach is overwhelmingly elite‑to‑elite: academic exchanges, trade delegations, and diplomatic communiqués. Meanwhile, for the broader public, the digital sphere produces a kind of “hyperpolitics”—a spectacle of inevitability and triumphalism that feels like political engagement, yet, citizens become spectators cheering for their geopolitical team, replacing the labor of organization with the illusion of participation. (Still, I’m thankful such spaces still exist at all.)
Fragmented, Competitive, and Transactional
These absences—no shared horizon, no global apparatus, no mobilized popular force—are visible in the actual behavior of the major multipolar powers today. If we look at the actually existing “East”—China, Russia, Iran, India, and others—we can sense a rather fragmented, transactional field of state interests.
There is no unified bloc as such. China seeks stability and integration into global markets; Russia is trying to rebuild its position and secure a defensive buffer; India pursues strategic autonomy between camps; Iran focuses on survival and regional deterrence. They operate in the same world‑system but do not form a single package with a shared horizon.
Furthermore, beneath the surface of diplomatic solidarity, there is real competition in all kinds of market domains and latent mistrust. Russia and Iran are, in important respects, competing gas exporters. China and India have unresolved border disputes and overlapping spheres of influence. Gulf states hedge between Washington, Beijing, and Moscow. The coordination that does exist is mostly tactical and provisional.
To come back to the language of “civilizations”: It pervades so many joint declarations gives non‑Western elites a vocabulary to resist with dignity based on histories. However, such a discourse doesn’t touch internal class structures. Almost any domestic order can be wrapped in civilizational rhetoric; there is no need for a shared social or economic program. The category is elastic enough to include monarchies and neoliberal democracies under the same banner.
And what we see, above all, is bargaining rather than an attempt at collective security. Russia and China avoid direct military intervention far from home—one more than the other. Iran is effectively left alone in West Asia. Every state hedges across multiple partners (and lets not talk about who sells what to whom…), keeping channels open to Washington even as they sign joint declarations condemning unilateral sanctions. This does not mean they are indifferent to one another’s survival. But in the absence of a shared horizon, what dominates is bargaining for one’s own position and survival.
The Structural Logic of Hedging
The current multipolar powers are not simply choosing to hedge and bargain out of short‑sightedness or bad faith. They are structurally forced into it by the absence of a shared project. Drawing on Gramsci’s notion of hegemony, a shared horizon is not merely an idea that states can adopt when convenient; it is an intersubjective condition—a collective understanding of the world that builds consent, defines interests in common, and serves as a substitute for formal hierarchy among allies. When such a horizon is absent, states inevitably revert to a defensive posture. And when every state is in a defensive posture, hedging becomes the only structurally available option.
The Cold War, for all its dangers and difficulties, demonstrated what a shared project makes possible—and its absence today reveals why the current multipolar field remains fractured below the surface.
A shared project gives states a common diagnosis of the threat they face, allowing them to coordinate even when their immediate material interests diverge. During the Cold War, the Marxist‑Leninist analysis of imperialism provided movements and states across the Global South with a shared understanding of the causes of theirs and the world’s troubles and a sense of common destiny. That shared diagnosis created a framework within which national differences, which certainly exist, could be negotiated. Today, without it, the major powers operate from different threat assessments. China sees the United States as a declining power to be patiently outlasted; Russia sees it as an immediate threat to its survival that must be disrupted now. These are different readings of the strategic situation (which is logical since every country is in another position in this world-system), and they make coordinated action extraordinarily difficult.
A shared project also provides something to fight for, not just something to fight against: a positive goal. The building of socialism—however distant the goal, however compromised the practice—gave the Cold War’s anti‑imperialist movements a positive horizon. That horizon justified short‑term sacrifices because there was a long‑term destination. Today, the multipolar powers are united almost exclusively by opposition to US unilateralism. That is a thin bond since opposition does not tell you what you are building toward. And without an answer to that second question, no state will accept significant costs on behalf of another.
Perhaps in an essential manner, a shared project creates institutionalized trust. The Comintern, the World Federation of Trade Unions, the Tricontinental Conference—these were sites where personal bonds were forged through shared struggle, where cadres trained together, where a sense of mutual obligation was cultivated over years and decades. In such an environment, trust was embedded in the institutional fabric. Today’s equivalents—BRICS, the SCO—are forums for sovereign states where trust must be earned deal by deal, action by action in the foreign policy realm, and can evaporate as soon as interests shift, whether through internal dynamics or external pressure.
Finally, a shared project provides a substitute for formal hierarchy—a mechanism for holding national elites accountable to something larger than their own immediate enrichment. During the Cold War, the revolutionary line, however imperfectly and inconsistently enforced, could check the pull of comprador capture. Today, that check is gone. Capitalist classes within China, Russia, Iran, and across the Global South have material interests in continued integration with Western markets. Without a shared ideology to constrain them, they will quietly attempt to steer their states back toward the US‑led system. The empire’s fragmentationist strategy exploits precisely this vulnerability: it offers integrationist factions a path back into the good graces of the imperial order, fracturing domestic cohesion gradually.
The consequence of these four absences is that the rational strategy for any individual state, given the conditions it actually faces, is to hedge. Every promise in a joint communiqué is understood to be contingent and revocable. No state will risk its own security on the basis of a diplomatic declaration alone. The same China that signs a joint statement with Russia condemning unilateral sanctions will simultaneously negotiate a separate agricultural deal with the United States that damages Russian and Brazilian interests. This dynamic plays out across the board: nations routinely strike bilateral bargains that undercut their supposed strategic allies. Ultimately and unfortunately, the lack of a shared horizon makes anything other than hedging for one’s own position structurally irrational in this conjuncture.
It is true that multipolar states genuinely desire regional stability. China wants a stable Russia and a stable Iran to secure its energy supply chains; Russia wants a stable Central Asia and a stable Middle East. But “wanting stability” is not the same as “being willing to sacrifice for it.” Each state hopes that others will bear the costs while hedging against the possibility that those others will defect. This is a classic collective action problem, and without a Gramscian shared project to transform this calculus of self‑interest, genuine collective security will likely remain out of reach.
The result is a world of constant bargaining, where every commitment is provisional and every relationship is transactional. This is elite‑competitive multipolarity—and the transnational US‑led Bunker State is structurally designed to navigate it, co‑opt it, and survive within it.
The Multi-Layered Cage
Compared to the Cold War, there is simply no global “outside” large enough to support a rival institutional architecture. BRICS is an economic and diplomatic forum designed to increase geopolitical bargaining power. The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is a massive infrastructure project meant to optimize physical trade routes. Neither constitutes an alternative financial or economic architecture; what’ss more: they are essentially seeking to operate more advantageously within the capitalist world-system.
Indeed, beneath these diplomatic forums lies a very concrete financial and infrastructural cage. For any Global Majority country, both state and private capital must still operate largely through infrastructures built—and heavily policed—by the US‑led core:
The Dollar & Payments (SWIFT vs. CIPS): Despite persistent de-dollarization rhetoric, the dollar still accounts for roughly 90% of global trade finance via SWIFT. China’s Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS) is growing, but it remains a fraction of global volume. Furthermore, the foreign reserves of most countries remain heavily concentrated in US Treasuries.
Western Credit Rating Agencies: Moody’s, S&P, and Fitch still dictate the cost at which firms and sovereign states can borrow internationally. A political rupture with Washington triggers immediate downgrades that ripple devastatingly through a dissenting country’s entire financial system.
The Intellectual Property Regime: From aviation to semiconductors, global industries remain reliant on Western-origin technology, patents, and standard-setting bodies. Recent US export controls have demonstrated exactly how quickly this dependence can be weaponized to cripple a rival’s strategic sectors.
Global Insurance and Shipping Infrastructure: The London insurance market, major shipping registries, and international arbitration courts remain deeply embedded in the Western legal and financial order. Other countries cannot simply bypass them without building parallel institutions at an astronomical cost over many decades.
The Test Case
Naturally, China is the decisive test case for this framework. I have been describing a world in which even the largest powers are locked into an elite‑competitive multipolarity, but the immediate objection is clear. China is a socialist state with a Marxist‑led party, a vast state sector, and a declared long‑term orientation toward socialism. Doesn’t that alter the entire calculus? If any state could break out of the cage and build a structural alternative, surely it is China.
Yet when we look at how China’s own strategic doctrine and Marxist economics understand its position in the world and history, a different picture emerges. The embeddedness I have been describing has been internalized by the Chinese state’s own intellectual and political sphere.
Mainstream Chinese Marxist economists like Cheng Enfu describe the PRC as a “socialist market economy” governed by a “dual regulation mechanism,” in which the Party‑state steers markets over the long term to develop productive forces and raise living standards. Western Marxists tend to read this as straightforward state capitalism, but even on Cheng’s own terms the key point for my argument is that China’s internal socialist tendencies are in constant dialectical tension with the capitalist imperatives of the world‑economy it remains part of. Global integration—WTO membership, foreign direct investment, participation in value chains—is treated as a tool to be used under Party leadership, and not as a step toward building a parallel socialist world market. In other words, the official doctrine assumes a long transition conducted inside a capitalist world‑system that continues to set many of the constraints.
Nonetheless, I am not saying that the Chinese government just sits there, trapped. Of course not. China is actively trying to reduce its vulnerability within this hostile system. The Five-Year Plans and industrial policies are the practical expression of Cheng’s “wealth-power dialectic”: using markets and global integration to build national strength, while gradually re-socializing wealth over time. The current push for technological self-reliance—semiconductors, AI, green tech, advanced manufacturing—is a deliberate strategy to move up value chains, make China less dependent on the US-centric core, and reduce the leverage that Washington can exercise through export controls and financial denial, all while avoiding an abrupt rupture that would destabilize the Chinese economy itself.
In short, China is trying to change its position and degree of vulnerability within the existing world-system over decades, using state-led industrial policy and controlled openness.
The Historical Constraint
If we ask ourselves why there is no alternative “outside” yet, we can point to a crucial historical lesson drawn directly from the Soviet collapse—an event the Chinese leadership has studied exhaustively. They concluded that trying to build a global mass movement, with open-ended support for various liberation struggles, invited severe overextension and ultimately damaged the state. For Beijing, the Soviet experience demonstrated the material impossibility of sustaining a global counter-hegemonic project against a hostile capitalist world-economy that could absorb it eventually.
Thus, beginning in the late 1970s, Beijing’s priority shifted from global revolution to securing a “peaceful international environment for development” and “managing our own affairs well.” The core lesson was clear: trying to maintain a global revolutionary posture without first prioritizing domestic development and flexible adaptation led directly to strategic vulnerability.
The most direct evidence of this internal understanding comes from Zheng Bijian, the former Executive Vice President of the Central Party School and a key architect of the “China’s Peaceful Rise” doctrine. In 2006, he stated:
“In strengthening comprehensive national power, the Chinese people will not pursue the ‘Soviet Dream.’ Back then, the Soviet Union engaged in an all-out arms race and large-scale ‘export of revolution’ abroad, whereas China simply focuses on developing itself. ‘We only export computers, not revolution.’“
And in 2011 this was specified further in a text about the strategic outlook for China’s development between 2011 and 2020, he explicitly contrasted China’s path with the American Dream (high energy consumption), the European Dream (colonization), and the Soviet Dream (exporting revolution). “We only export goods, capital, and markets; we do not export revolution.”
Anti-Hegemonic
And yet, even from within this multi-layered cage, what we are witnessing across the global landscape is genuinely anti-hegemonic. The unipolar command structure is broken. Multiple powers are pushing back against US dominance, reclaiming policy space, and building partial alternatives like currency swaps, new infrastructure corridors, diplomatic coordination through BRICS and the SCO. These developments are valuable and are one of the reasons why this moment is multipolar at all.
But what we are not yet seeing, in any sustained or systemic form, is an anti-imperialist project. The historical infrastructure of anti-imperialism—a shared horizon, mass organizations that mobilize ordinary people across borders, collective security arrangements, a positive vision of a different mode of organizing society and the economy—is absent. The international outreach that does exist is overwhelmingly elite-to-elite: infrastructure deals, academic exchanges, and diplomatic communiqués. It builds connectivity, certainly, but it does not build a shared ideological project.
China is the clearest illustration of this pattern precisely because it is the largest and most capable of the multipolar powers. If a socialist state with a Marxist leadership, a vast state sector, and enormous economic weight is not building an anti-imperialist “outside,” that tells us something meaningful about the structural constraints everyone is facing. In essence, China is focused on reducing its own vulnerability to ensure its survival within the existing system—a defensive posture mirrored by dozens of other countries just trying to find safety and stability in a hostile architecture.
Any attempt to convert the current capitalist multipolarity into something genuinely anti‑imperial would require, at minimum: drastically reducing reliance on US‑controlled financial and legal levers, rewiring trade and payments outside that orbit at scale, and taking real political risks on behalf of weaker, more exposed states and movements. These are steps that would invite enormous costs and severe instability for any coalition of states collectively willing to make the attempt.
The current multipolar world is anti-hegemonic. That reality should not be minimized. But until the material and organizational conditions for a true alternative exist—more mixed economies, more cross-border institutions rooted in popular participation, and a shared horizon that goes beyond civilizational coexistence—the default trajectory will remain elite-competitive. The empire can live with that. And this will mean continued violence.
A Note on “Western Projection”
Finally, I want to address a common objection here, because responding to it will clarify what I am—and am not—saying. When I describe the current system as elite‑competitive multipolarity, some will inevitably argue that I am projecting Western imperial behavior onto China or Russia, or implying that they secretly seek to build global empires of their own. I am doing no such thing.
Elite‑competitive multipolarity does not mean that Beijing or Moscow are trying to build US‑style empires. For the most part, they are defensive powers seeking autonomy, survival and stability within a global system they cannot exit. Further, Zheng Bijian’s explicit doctrine—“we only export computers, not revolution”—is a deliberate repudiation of the Leninist Comintern model.
But ironically, this defensive posture is precisely what makes these powers so vulnerable to the Bunker State. Because they are not building an anti‑imperialist architecture—because they are building pipelines and trade corridors rather than, or better yet, alongside, a shared revolutionary infrastructure—the empire can use sanctions, sabotage, elite capture, and hybrid warfare to pick them off one by one. It can physically blow up their connecting infrastructure and keep them continuously entangled before they ever form a genuine collective alternative. The very defensiveness that keeps them alive in the short term is what will leave them structurally vulnerable in the long term.
Addendum
These are the Notes and Interviews that partly touch upon the topics discussed here:
China is trapped in an imperial world that will not collapse anytime soon. Jeff Rich
Multipolarity, US Decline & Mass Politics – Interview with Nel Bonilla Liberation News Network
Beyond the Headlines: The Trump-Xi Summit & The Realities of Empire
Short Note on Empire, Survival, and Multipolarity
The Pulse of a Country vs. The Health of an Empire
Short Note on 4d Chess vs. Chaos
Join the Conversation
As we conclude this first part of the analysis, I want to hear from you.
If you live in or follow a Global Majority country—whether Mexico, Russia, China, Iran, Brazil, South Africa, or elsewhere—do you see the multi‑layered cage operating? Is your country genuinely building the institutional and economic autonomy needed to reduce its vulnerability, or is it being quietly absorbed into the financialized compliance architecture of the US‑led core? Are the mixed‑economy experiments, the de‑dollarization efforts, the new infrastructure corridors making a material difference, or are they still too marginal to shift the underlying dynamics?
If you live in the imperial core—the United States, Britain, Europe, or the Anglosphere more broadly—have you seen developments that fit the topic of this essay? The hollowing out of the social contract, the rise of the Bunker State, the shift from consent to coercion? Do you see the invisibility of the imperial infrastructure in your own daily life—the courts, the rating agencies, the compliance departments, the tech platforms operating as quasi‑imperial institutions?
More importantly, do you see the conceptual blind spot I’ve described at work—the assumption that multipolarity automatically means anti-imperialism, that the shift in the balance of power is the same thing as a shift in the logic of the system? Where does the inevitability myth show up in the media you consume, and where do you see it being challenged?
Wherever you are, the default trajectory I have described is not inevitable. Where do you see genuine efforts—however embryonic—to build the kind of mixed economies, cross‑border institutions, or shared horizons that might break the cage? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.
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Nel
Hi Nel, thank you for the great piece as always. This has been a roller coaster piece for me. With each passing paragraph, I found myself agreeing and disagreeing in multiple aspects. But I think you write it clearly : without collective will to progress together and without sacrifice, anti-imperialism is not possible. But this leads me to a specific question : to what degree is anti-imperialism needed and realistically possible?
I will put my country (Indonesia) into perspective. Does people think the government is autocratic? Absolutely. Does people in majority whish for a better state governance? Absolutely. But does people care whether it’s imperialistic in nature or not? Now this is the main question for my country. Looking at historical context and current social economic conditions, I would dare say that what people care is only their livelihood. This part is quite general as in every other parts of the world. But the varying degree of “acceptable livelihood” in Indonesia is mind boggling. You can have an office worker working in the same place, in the same city, with the same living cost, wishing for very different livelihood. I think this is the part where consumerism that is capitalized by imperialist needs to be toned down.
But does the majority of Indonesia civillians wish for more rights and responsibility in statecraft? Rights yes, responsibility definitely no. This is the reality and this is where the Chinese model is actually very fitting. Not in the context of its policy, but of it’s mindset. Domestic governance should be the priority right now for all country wishing for resisting hegemony. Whether this leads to anti-imperialism or not, I don’t think majority of Indonesian citizens care because we are in such a deep economic and welfare crisis that all we focus on right now is survival. Coincidentally, this survival is impossible without certain revolution in domestic affairs management. This is, again, where anti-imperial become relevant : resisting wealth extraction. Wealth extraction from the poor and the working class into the ruling class.
However, let’s say a new ruler rise in Indonesia that is able to relatively increase the prosperity of the majority of people. Whether this new ruler is pro US imperialism or not, most people will not care. It’s just that right now the imperialism of US is so aggressive that the people of Indonesia has opened their eyes to this fact. If another empire can tone down US’ imperialism and by doing so improve Indonesian’s livelihood, I don’t think most Indonesian care about anti-imperialism. This is just the sad but true reality in my country. In the end we are only looking for a way of state management that could improve our livelihood, which is as you mentioned, what Russia, China, and Iran is doing. Anyway, hope this could be of some information to the discussion!
Even if I generally admire your analyses, Nel, it feels to me like you're not reading Lenin's "Imperialism..." correctly enough, maybe because you're a bit too trapped in the "campista" narrative in which the only "imperialism" is that of the consolidated hegemon, the US Empire. 110 years later the parallels with Lenin's context are striking to me and have been so for some time: the USA is Great Britain (the hyper-financiarized Empire in decline) and China is Germany (the industrial powerhouse and rising star that prefers soft-gloved imperialism such as trading with Brazil and Mexico or building the Baghdad Railroad). There are some differences but not enough not to see that the parllels are striking.
And Lenin, even if he accepted some help by Germany to migrate from Switzerland to the Baltic, had no illusions about the Central Powers being "anti-imperialist" at all, all the opposite. That's why he and comrades demanded the "sealed train", so they could remain uncontaminated from German capitalist and imperialist influence. Like him, we should keep ourselves "sealed" from any hope that Dengist (capitalist) China is our friend in the anti-imperialist struggle, much less the fight for the extremely urgent eco-socialist revolution.
As you repeatedly quote: “We only export goods, capital, and markets; we do not export revolution.” That says it all about the nature of China. There are smaller state actors like Cuba or Algeria, both emerged from socialist and anti-imperialist revolutions, which I deem respectable and credible, but no great power of that type anymore. And Algeria particularly has noticed that China is not trustworthy, going in few years from celebrating a long history of friendship with China to totally snubbing BRICS because China is selling war drones to sub-imperialist Morocco in their fight against West Sahara.
China is selfish and totally imperialist in their behavior. They're also militaristic-imperialist in some areas like the South China Sea, their support for the infamous military junta of Myanmar or the 99 years lease of a naval base in Sri Lanka, but they're mostly Bismarck-style soft-gloved imperialist. As I sometimes say: China doesn't play wéiqí (go) anymore, as Pepe Escobar claimed over a decade ago: now they play plain Monopoly, buying and selling without any grand strategy.
In fact, their grand imperialist strategy, the BRI (formerly the new Silk Road) is quite broke for lack of actual commitment to its consolidation... but that's another story.
Imperialism is ultimately not just something that powers, capitalist powers, do but the name of the game of capitalist competition for the world's resources and markets. It's thus not just something that the USA does but also everyone else to some extent or another, quite notably China. One has been doing it for a century or two, the other (unless we go to ancient history or go to the issues of Tibet and the Indian borders) only in the last decade maybe. But they both do it.
The USSR, with all their limitations, was a much better reference, especially after Stalin. Call me "revisionist" if you wish: it's better than Dengist.