Reprinted from John’s Substack:
On 27 August 2026, I was on Glenn Diesen’s popular podcast, where we had a wide-ranging discussion about the structural changes that have taken place in the international system since the Cold War that first led us into the unipolar moment — which many people viewed as the “end of history” — and then into the new multipolar world — which is downright dangerous and promises to remain so.
I emphasized that those structural changes not only had an effect on how states behave, but the movement from unipolarity to multipolarity also left most academics and most members of the foreign elite ignorant of how great power politics work. After all there was only one great power in unipolarity, so great power politics was effectively taken off the table. Of course, it has come back with a vengeance. Our elites, however, both inside and outside universities, are still stuck in time, imagining that anyone who thinks in terms of basic realist logic is a dinosaur. One can rest assured that Chinese, Iranian, and Russian leaders don’t have that problem. Moreover, those same Western elites have little knowledge of nuclear strategy and deterrence theory, because those subjects were of little relevance during the unipolar moment.
