Multipolarity: Glenn Diesen on the end of Ukraine, and Europe in a Trumpist New World
No European who saw it would have avoided a pang of dread, when a meme appeared online this week, in the wake of the DeepSeek AI phenomenon.
It pictured three dragons. One, ferocious, on its chest the logos of OpenAI, MetaAI, Gemini AI, and the US flag.
The other, just as ferocious: featured the Chinese flag, and the logo of DeepSeek.
The third, looking like the kid in primary school who eats the crayons, featured the EU logo, and the emblematic grafted-on plastic water bottle lid that has become totemic of the EU’s failure to do anything but regulate itself out of existence.
The message was clear. Europe is increasingly at a crossroads. Between the coming eastern powers, and the declining western powers. And if it isn’t at the table, it will be on the menu.
Which way, European man?
Glen Diesen is professor at the University of South-Eastern Norway.
He has a very popular substack, and is a regular guest on a range of podcasts, including The Duran. We’re very glad to have him here today, to talk about Europe, Trumpism, the end of the Ukraine War, and beyond.
1. I had the pleasure of discussing multipolarity on the Geopolitics Podcast with Philip Pilkington, Andrew Collingwood and Gavin Haynes. It is important to take a step back and look at the wider changes in the international system that produced the Ukraine War, the US-China tensions and other conflicts around the world.
The world order is shifting from unipolarity to multipolarity. After the Cold War, the US outlined a security strategy based on global primacy in which security for itself and the world depends on perpetual US dominance. The logic was that the benign hegemony of the US would result in the end of security competition between the great powers, as opposed to mitigating the security competition by pursuing a balance of power and indivisible security. The US hegemony could only remain benign for a short period as hegemony requires much coercion to prevent rivals from emerging and to sustain the concentration of power. The US exhausted its resources to maintain an empire, while other centres of power around the world had to collectively balance the US. Unipolarity is now over, yet the US as its NATO allies still pursue a security strategy dependent on dominance rather than recognising that security derives from mitigating the security competition by also taking into account the security of rivals. There are solutions available to all the main conflicts, yet these paths are not taken as they entail the demise of US global primacy and the collective hegemony of the political West.
