The Multipolarity Trap: How a KGB talking point became a staple of American right-wing discourse (Park MacDougald, April 07, 2026, Tablet)
At the time, this struck us as a strange argument to make at a nominally “America First” conference. Multipolarity, after all, was originally conceived by the Russian intelligence services as a tool to weaken the West. It was first formulated by Yevgeny Primakov, a KGB Arabist who served as foreign minister under Russian President Boris Yeltsin, and has since been popularized internationally by the state-backed Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin. In essence, multipolarity opposes “unipolar” U.S. dominance in favor of an arrangement in which Russia and its allies, China and Iran, are granted freedom of action in their respective “spheres of influence.” Over time, the idea has worked its way into the propaganda of China and Iran and the arguments of their Western sympathizers.
While phrased as an essentially defensive arrangement against American “globalism,” multipolarity is, in practice, a strategy for Communist-Islamist world domination. U.S. grand strategy since World War II is premised on the idea of “forward defense” in the Eurasian rimland, which runs from continental Europe to the Middle East and on to coastal Asia, and which is home to most of the world’s people and economic activity. Without control of the rimland, presently secured by the combination of U.S. naval power and Washington’s system of alliances, the United States would become a second-tier “hemispheric” power. For elements of the isolationist right, the appeal of being a “hemispheric” power in a “multipolar” world is no doubt that it would rule out further U.S. military entanglements in far-flung locations while allowing us to shed the costs of maintaining our “empire.” But exchanging lucrative economic and defense partnerships with Europe, Japan, Saudi Arabia, and Israel for stronger relations with El Salvador and Peru is hardly a recipe for increasing American military power or national wealth. Instead, it would be the greatest self-own in the history of geopolitics—a recipe for making America radically poorer and less secure, and therefore subject to the dictates of more powerful countries like China. Which one suspects is the point.
In reality, it’s an ever more unipolar world.