The Emergence of the Multi-Polar Authoritarian World: Looking Back from 2024

We started our first website, Second Line of Defense in 2009. I started this venture with Murielle Delaporte. We published our first website with two sides, one in English and one in French.

Since then, I have added a second website Defense.info in 2018, and Murielle has now published her French defense magazine for 15 years and has moved her web work to https://operationnels.com/.

On https://sldinfo.com/, we have published more than 5,000 articles and nearly 2,000 on defense.info.

We have focused on the evolution of global strategy and of the military forces and concepts of operations of the United States, our allies and partners and our strategic competitors.

From the standpoint of 2024, we have 15 years of publication. Looking back at this period and what we have written throughout that period underscores a core point: this is a very very significant period of change in the global competition.

We have seen a dramatic change from the 1990s where the United States was in a pole position to re-shape the world and craft a way ahead for Western civilization. We are now in a world not of our making.

The rise of the 21st century authoritarian states and movements have driven change in the global situation to which the liberal democracies have incoherently responded. And conflicts within our societies are providing significant rifts and disagreements which provide enhanced opportunities for multi-polar authoritarianism to further enhance their position.

My own travels in Europe, Australia and the United States have seen globalization as envisaged in the 1990s as essentially over. Our essays track the significant global shift in power which has occurred over the past 15 years.

In this book, we have focused on key strategic developments over the past 15 years that seen a significant change from the American-led rules based order to one where the global disaggregation is clearly underway. The “rules based order” has shrunk and if the elites of the liberal democracies do not spend more time and resources on defending our world as opposed to infighting within their societies and with each other, it will shrink more.

The essays in the book have been written at various times in the past 15 years and by a number of our contributors.

It has been an incredible journey building the content on the websites and working with a wide range of contributors and doing hundreds of interviews over the years.

I have published a number of books on military developments, and force structure evolution.

In this book, the focus is upon strategic developments over the past 15 years, and articles have been selected which punch up the theme of global transition.

I have organized the essays to highlight the strategic shift. I placed the essays on China, North Korea and Russia prior to those on the liberal democratic states. They have driven the change in the global  situation we live in today.

I then turn to a section which highlights some of the flash points in the past 15 years which have driven the change.

Frankly, the most stunning point going back 15 years is how dramatic to global strategic shift has been.

We highlight this in the essays included in this volume.

An article published in The Wall Street Journal on August 24, 2024 highlighted where the West finds itself now and is entitled, “The West’s Next Challenge is the Rising Axis of Autocracies.”

The author argues:

The coalescing partnership of autocracies led by China and Russia will impose strategic choices on Western democracies, no matter who wins the U.S. presidential election.

Can the U.S. and its allies deter all these rivals—including Iran and North Korea—at the same time, given the decay in the West’s military-industrial base and the unwillingness of voters to spend dramatically more on defense?

And if not, should, and could, an accommodation be sought with one of the rival great powers? If so, which one—and at what cost?

The current moment is uniquely complicated, with multiple crises around the world increasingly interconnected. Bloody wars in Ukraine and the Middle East are showing no signs of abating, Iran is contemplating a military response against Israel, China is engaging in low- level sea clashes with the Philippines and intimidating Taiwan, and North Korea is ramping up provocations against South Korea.

This volume describes how we got here and underscores the failure of Washington and the allies to focus on the rise of multi-polar authoritarianism which was obvious rather than celebrating the vacuous nonsense of the “end of history.”

But when you pursue globalization, believe in the end of history, and think you are defining the “rules based order,” why do you have to pay attention to the significant global shift unfolding before your eyes?

Rather than a world of multi-polarity or great national power competition, a key aspect of the new historical epoch we have entered is multi-polar authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is clearly globally ascendent, but these regimes or groups do not share a common ideology or action program.

They are not in alliance, although they cooperate when convenient for their particular interests. They support splintered globalization which is when global rules exist to some extent to handle globally important exchanges but the authoritarians are not contributing political capital to maintaining the “rules-based order.”

Many of these authoritarian states or groups have roots deeply inside Western democracies and through various means operate within Western societies, rather than simply being an external threat.

These means are diverse: cyber, economic investments, economic partners who advocate their economic interest, or in the case of a number of Middle Eastern states, the impact of a migration which has not been characterized by new arrivals in the West shedding their cultural or political identities from where they came.

At the same time, the liberal democracies or the West as it used to be called, is in the throes of significant self-questioning, internal debates, rejection of capitalism as practiced the last 50 years, and the emergence of disaggregated societies in each of the Western states.

These states work together on common issues, but cooperation is challenged by internal national or regional debates (in the case of Europe.)

This new era is a major challenge to the United States and its governing elites. It no longer commands a Western shaped global order. There is no great crusade as Eisenhower wrote about.

It is about national interests and winnowing commitments to the availability of resources, whether military or financial. The governing elite has not practiced or thought in terms of such discipline and the gap between the evolution of the new era and American leadership is clearly out of phase.

The war in Ukraine is not about democracy: it is about a NATO war with Russia to constrain Russian ambitions. What is the end game and how can America define and protect its interests?

We are not in with Ukraine to the end because Ukrainian and American interests are not the same. I remember the same team in Washington now promised the same to the Afghans. How did that turn out?

The war in the Middle East is one which the United States needs to be careful not to get sucked into a negative relationship with the Arab world and avoid being the paymaster for the rebuilding of Gaza by an Israeli run process.

And neither of these actions has much to do one another.

It is a case-by-case world in which national interests need to be carefully defined and resources calibrated to those interests.

The size and weight of the American debt and the limitations on American military power are real.

We need a re-calibration of polices for the new historical era in line with our interests and a realistic understanding of our resources and capabilities, and their strengths and limits. This will be enforced by global events, or the United States can frame a strategy that recognizes both limits and opportunities in a world in which we live rather than a world we simply imagine is still there.

This book will be published in the first quarter of 2025.