*Originally published in 2024 and preserved as part of our archive project.Get E-International Relations delivered to your inbox, free of charge. As you sign up, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support our work.

If there ever really was a unipolar world dominated by the U.S. in the years after the end of the Cold War, it certainly is not in existence now. A multipolar world is emerging instead. This emerging multipolar world is one in which the U.S. is seen as less powerful than it was during the unipolar era, and in which anti-American powers--including China, Russia, and some of their partners--are seen as gaining ground against the U.S. and its allies. Even some of the U.S.’s longstanding partners such as Turkiye, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) are undertaking assertive actions and cooperating with one or more of Washington’s adversaries. While most of America’s Western allies have joined the U.S. in aiding Ukraine and sanctioning Moscow after Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, most “Global South” governments have not done so. Further, incoming President Trump and many Republicans in Congress openly question the value to the U.S. of the alliance relationships built up by previous presidents and even the terms under which the U.S. should continue to uphold them.

Yet while the U.S. may now be less influential than it appeared during the unipolar moment, the U.S. very much remains a great power in the emerging multipolar world. Furthermore, the U.S. may have some opportunities in navigating this multipolar world that it did not have (or had less of) during its unipolar moment or during the preceding bipolar Cold War era. Why is this? In a multipolar world, great powers have the opportunity to engage in buck-passing. As the renowned international relations theorist John J. Mearsheimer explained in his The Tragedy of Great Power Politics:

A buck-passer attempts to get another state to bear the burden of deterring or possibly fighting an aggressor, while it remains on the sidelines. The buck-passer fully recognizes the need to prevent the aggressor from increasing its share of world power but looks for some other state that is threatened by the aggressor to perform that onerous task (Mearsheimer 2014, 157–8).

A buck-passer attempts to get another state to bear the burden of deterring or possibly fighting an aggressor, while it remains on the sidelines. The buck-passer fully recognizes the need to prevent the aggressor from increasing its share of world power but looks for some other state that is threatened by the aggressor to perform that onerous task (Mearsheimer 2014, 157–8).

In a bipolar world, though, this is not possible because a gain for one of the bipolar great powers is necessarily a loss for the other. As Mearsheimer (2014, 270) put it, "no buck-passing takes place among the great powers in bipolarity because there is no third party to catch the buck".

In a unipolar world order, all challenges to the existing order are also challenges to the unipolar power, and so any challenge poses the threat, if not to the unipolar power itself, then to one or more of its less powerful allies and to the unipolar order as a whole. As Nuno Monteiro wrote in International Security, "a unipole will oppose any attempt by minor powers to revise the status quo in a way that is detrimental to its interests" (Monteiro 2011/12, 31). In both bipolar and unipolar worlds, then, the dominant polar power(s) feel the need to respond to all challenges, but doing so is highly costly and can be unsuccessful--as the U.S. experienced both during the Cold War and War on Terror eras.

Now that a multipolar world order has arrived, though, the U.S. may have opportunities to engage in buck-passing that it did not have in the bipolar or unipolar eras. This is not to say that this is a better world for the U.S. (much less for the world as a whole) or that the U.S. will necessarily be successful at buck-passing. In fact, buck-passing can fail spectacularly if the assumptions on which it is based are faulty. But just like it is for other countries, buck-passing is now an opportunity for the U.S. in the emerging multipolar world. And at a time when the U.S. has become less willing to undertake military intervention or even support allies as much as it has done in the past, a multipolar world in which the U.S. can buck pass may even be preferable for the U.S. than a bipolar or unipolar world in which it cannot.

How can this be? Instead of the U.S. itself undertaking the burdensome task of attempting to contain all its many adversaries simultaneously, the U.S. in a multipolar world can exploit opportunities posed by conflicting ambitions of other states (including adversaries and........

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