Opinion: Fight for Freedom, Not a Multipolar World

For all the talk of a multipolar world and ‘spheres of influence,’ it has always been the case that humanity is fundamentally divided into two poles: those people and nations whose instincts, however imperfect, are directed toward the protection of the freedoms and the dignity of the individual, and those whose objectives are the assertion of the state as categorically more important than the individual, i.e. dictatorships.

Grayness there is in the political manifestation, but the spirit of people always falls into these two poles.

The delusion of the new geopolitical vision

Today, we are facing a rapid realignment of the global order. Russia and China have constantly called for a multipolar world. Now the United States is revising its own view of the world and reimagining it in the frame of ‘spheres of influence’ and the protection of ‘its’ hemisphere, consistent with the vision of the world developing into multiple political poles.

Those who advance these ideas claim that they are dealing in a hard reality. In carving up the planet into areas of influence, so they say, they are replacing the abstract ideas of ‘international law’ with a more realistic view of geopolitics.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

Freedom, not multipolarity, is real

The blunt force of military power in a multipolar world does indeed seem more real than the more ethereal notion of freedom.

However, paradoxically, the reverse is the case.

There can be nothing more real in our lives than freedoms.

Democratic governance, with credible political opposition, and the range of freedoms that protect the peace and dignity of the individual: freedoms of the press, conscience, and many others.

The pursuit of freedom leads to a firm and principled commitment to a set of values that bring us security and liberate us from the whims and arbitrary decisions of the despot.

The concepts of ‘international law’ and a ‘rules-based order’ are not abstract at all. They were invented as a practical way to ensure fair play in which nations would respect national borders and resolve differences by democratic discussion, peaceful exchanges, while directing their energies not to war, but to the welfare of their people. They are the international expression of the ideas of freedom.

Multipolarity is an unprincipled abstraction

Multipolarity, because of its lack of rooted principle and its origins in nebulous ideas of comparative power, and undefined areas of influence, leads to uncertainty, instability and finally global chaos.

The reality is that spheres of influence are fabricated human constructs.

There is nothing ‘real’ about them in the sense that where we draw the boundaries of those areas of influence are artificial and capricious. For this reason, those states that lie at the periphery of those boundaries are contested in such a way as to invite conflict, disagreement and ultimately war.

What individuals experience in a multipolar world is the exercise of rank authority and brute force, terrifying from a distance, deadly close-up when it engulfs towns and cities that sit in the space between the projection of military dominance. Ukraine knows this all too well.

The ‘realpolitik’ of multipolarity is unreal, wafting in ultimately lethal and undefined notions of influence and power. The politics of freedom is real, determining the security of the lives we lead, the peace and dignity we can all enjoy.

Freedom leads to a fundamentally two-pole world

The alternative to a multipolar world with its arbitrary spheres of influence is to understand that the world is essentially aligned between two poles.

There are those nations fighting to construct a world of autocratic dominance, nations whose vision of life is one of the exercise of state power, especially by the individuals who command that power, and those nations whose ultimate objectives are the preservation of freedoms.

Where nations happen to physically be in the world, in what so-called hemisphere they exist, is irrelevant. Humanity has always fallen into one pole or the other, and it will continue to do so. It is incumbent on all nations and the individuals within them to decide to which pole they gravitate, wherever their physical geography places them.

Fight for freedom, not multipolarity

It is undeniable that the world will always have its pivots and its centers of power. So, in this sense, there do exist regions of the world where greater densities of economic and military capability exist. However, it is a failure of greater principle to see this situation as being the proper arbiter of how that force is exercised and how other nations should be treated.

Those nations that happen to have great economic and military might, prestige, and therefore naturally see themselves as a focus of influence, should project that potency in the interests of other free states, wherever they may be in the world, understanding this to be the higher order goal that will determine the fate and the quality of life of all of us for decades and centuries.

This modern conviction of freedom being the most important arc of history emerged after the Second World War. It was no coincidence.

The tens of millions of deaths and the global destruction that was wrought by the ruthless exercise of so-called ‘spheres of influence’ in an early twentieth-century conception of a multipolar world was a devastating and ruinous lesson.

The set of ideals envisaged in the last century is sometimes called the ‘post-Second World War order,’ but that is to give it the appearance of something specific in time and place. It is not.

In its essential essence, it was a realization that at last we must place the building of peaceful democratic states above those who would seek to maintain the world as a wrestling ring of great powers in which all our lives are mere playthings.

We must not return to a medieval world prior to the ideas of democratic states and individual freedoms, coaxed there by people and nations who would try to convince us that spheres of influence represent cold reality, and that freedom is an abstract flight of fancy.

All nations that find common cause in the ideas of freedom must reliably hold together as allies and friends, wherever in the world they may live, in whatever hemisphere they judge to be home.

Their job is to encourage all humanity to join the ranks and to defend a world of ordered and peaceful liberty, a future that is not utopian and idealistic, but an entirely achievable and practical ambition.

The views expressed in this opinion article are the author’s and not necessarily those of Kyiv Post.

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