Since Trump became the 47th President of the United States of America, he has been brazenly using the powers vested in him by the Constitution. Unilateral executive actions, such as blanket announcements of tariffs on friends and foes alike, the war on Iran, and other such actions, are pushing the global world towards a new architecture. Unlike a multipolar world where competing centers vie for dominance in a zero-sum game, a multiplex global order, a term coined by Prof. Amitav Acharya, Antoni Estevadeordal, and Louis W. Goodman, is defined by cooperation and cross-cultural interdependence and is in the making.
The primary characteristic of this transition is the absence of a singular global hegemon. In the post-1945 world, the “first world” often followed the United States' lead on global matters, such as the formation of NATO, and on economic consensus, such as the Washington Consensus. The United States’s assault on NATO countries and the latest pushback by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney suggest the erosion of the United States’s hegemony. Declaring that Canada is “at war” with America over trade barriers affecting their $900 billion bilateral relationship, Prime Minister Carney is aggressively exploring treaties with nations like China to build strategic autonomy. Such agreements were not possible in the old-world order. In a nutshell, the global hegemon is disappearing, and multiple actors are now assuming center stage in global interdependence.
Just as Washington’s transactional economic posture has forced middle powers to seek strategic autonomy, its volatile military footprint has triggered a democratization of global security architectures. The Mecca agreement between Pakistan, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Turkey is one such example. The core purpose of such agreements remains the same: the hegemon is weakening, and instead of looking to other great powers, international actors make space for themselves in the international arena. Since the 1990s, the United States has been the sole security provider and guarantor to the monarchies in the Middle East. However, in the wake of the United States’ strike on Iran and Iran’s retaliatory strikes, the Middle East was on its own.
A multiplex order is a more democratic system that emphasizes the mutual exchange of ideas and benefits.
This decentralization of security is closely mirrored in the realm of global governance. In the post-1945 world, only European countries came together to form the European Union. The coming together of European countries could be related to their shared identities and to the United States' patronage. Moreover, it was linked to the formation of a wall against the Soviet Union. However, such trends were not seen in any other part of the world. Now, each region is forming its own blocs out of regional needs. The African continent, which remained disintegrated for centuries, is coming together. The African Continental Free Trade Area comprises 54 countries, and it has agreements to boost trade and create transnational structures. Apart from Africa, Latin America is also coming close, as they share a common market and create networks. The global market is becoming diverse and creating interdependent zones. Instead of capital flowing to a few zones worldwide, it is now forming its own regional zones.
The global stage is becoming more democratized as the belief that the global community shares a wide variety of origins gains acceptance. In Prof. Amitav Acharya’s course, World Orders: The Decline of the West and Rise of the Rest, we discussed in class how, in the making of the present global order, a wide variety of nation-states or civilizations played their roles. For example, the Chinese invention of paper currency was transported to the West via the Silk Road. Moreover, the Silk Road came into being due to the vested commercial interests of Muslim empires, beginning with the Abbasid Empire. The current AI revolution goes back to Muslim contributions to algebra, and without the Indian numeral 0, known as the Arabic numeral, none of the groundbreaking discoveries in physics and mathematics would have been possible. Lastly, the global community is also moving away from Western dominance in ideas of governance. They are becoming more indigenous.
A multiplex order is a more democratic system that emphasizes the mutual exchange of ideas and benefits. Global values are the outcome of a diverse community that shares arrangements for security and makes policies on ideas that pose a global danger. In a multiplex order, alliances are also formed at regional and sub-regional levels. The current order is moving towards a multiplex global order. This article reflects an aspect of the courses I took during my first semester at the American University, with Dr. Amitav Acharya, who taught World Orders: Decline of the West and Rise of the Rest. Dr. Acharya is the author of several papers and books, his latest being The Once and Future World Order.