Thinking About the Current Global Order with 'Drezner's World'

Focus on Policy and Process - not on Structure

Dan Drezner’s most recent Substack ‘Drezner’s World’ piece (June 5, 2023) is all about the power distribution of the current global order. The title caught my eye: “It’s not a multipolar world” - To be fair I read most of Dan’s missives. But then, Dan offers up the following in the subhead: “it’s not a unipolar world either”. Okay, I thought, then what is it?

To be fair many IR experts expend a fair bit of analytic time, I’d say way to much time, considering changes to the global distribution of power presuming it will tell us a great deal about the current behaviors and outcomes - especially the potential for conflict in the system. And, as Dan points out: “No doubt there are deep trends - democratic recession, geoeconomic fragmentation, and the greatest number of state-based conflicts since the end of the Second World War – demonstrating just how badly the liberal international order has frayed.” Surely, the last point is the most troubling – that is the growing interstate conflicts – most dramatically, of course, the Russian aggression in Ukraine.

So, what is it? Well, it is no longer a unipolar order, but Dan argues that aside from China there are no other poles: not Russia, nor the EU, nor any of the large Global South actors including India, though he suggests India might be in the future. For Dan then we are left with a large still powerful US - though not powerful enough to maintain the earlier unipolar order – and a lesser, though powerful China. So, the conclusion: “for the rest of this decade, however, it is a bipolar world”.

Look - the distribution of power does say something about the stability of the international order but the IR ‘fixation’ on power distribution – long the focus of IR types – misses the critical framing of global order relations. It is not most critically structure – the distribution of power – but process – how powers act and where agency leads them to advance policy. It is the Biden Administration policy to declare and act on strategic competition with China. It is builds on the democracy-autocracy divide pressed by the Biden Administration policy in the G7. It is Xi Jinping’s new aggressiveness – witness the recent dangerous encounters of PLA aircraft and ships. It is the unwillingness of China to open continuing channels of military and more broadly bilateral US-China communication and discourse that raises the international relations temperature and increases the prospects of conflict.

My fellow IR types focus on the process, not on the structure.