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The Roots Rights & Reason Show - America's Future
Roots, Rights and Reason with Lee Smith
The Multipolar Shift: Who Controls The World Next?
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In this episode of Roots, Rights & Reason, Lee Smith welcomes returning guest J. Michael Waller for a timely discussion on the concept of multipolarity and its growing influence in global affairs.
Smith and Waller examine competing visions of global order, from alliance-based systems rooted in shared interests to spheres of influence dominated by adversarial regimes. The conversation explores the role of NATO, the rise of China, shifting dynamics in the Middle East, and the future of American leadership on the world stage. At a moment of rapid geopolitical change, this episode offers a clear-eyed assessment of what is at stake in the debate over the balance of global power.
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From the brave roots of our founding, to the unstoppable force of American ingenuity, to the sacred inheritance of freedom we must protect. This is our legacy. Join investigative journalist Lee Smith on Roots, Rights, and Reason. Powered by America's future.
SPEAKER_00Hi, I'm Lee Smith. Welcome and thanks for joining us for this new episode of Roots, Rights, and Reason. This week we're discussing an idea from the world of international relations. It's been getting lots of attention lately. Multipolarity. Multipolarity refers to a global power structure in which multiple countries hold significant political, economic, and military influence. This contrasts with a unipolar system where one dominant power leads, as the United States did after the Cold War. There's also a bipolar system, like the rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Multipolar systems have existed before, such as in 19th century Europe, where several great powers balanced one another. While this sometimes maintained stability, it also created shifting alliances and rivalries that contributed to major conflicts like World War I. In the modern era, the idea of multipolarity has taken on new political meaning, especially through the influence of a 20th century spy chief named Yevgeny Primakov. He played a key role in shaping Russia's foreign policy after the collapse of the Soviet Union. The so-called Primakov doctrine rejected American dominance and advocated for closer cooperation among major non-Western powers, particularly Russia and China, to counter U.S. power. In other words, multipolarity may sound like it describes a new world order in which the major powers respect each other's interests and freely share resources. But in fact, it really means a world in which dangerous US adversaries seek to minimize American influence and power. And that has serious consequences for how we Americans live at home. For example, China's rise as an economic and military power has already weakened our manufacturing base. Russia's efforts to reassert influence in Europe may shape our trade relations with our most important trade partner. Multipolarity, then, is not just a descriptive concept. It is primarily a strategic objective to weaken America. Today we're speaking with J. Michael Waller, a frequent guest on Roots, Rights, and Reason. Mike is a senior analyst for strategy at Center for Security Policy. He is also author of the 2024 book, Big Intel: How the CIA and FBI Went From Cold War Heroes to Deep State Villains. Mike Waller, thanks so much for being here with us this week. We're talking about multipolarity. This is a concept drawn from the world of international affairs. And you normally we'd think this might be a little uh a little esoteric, but we see it appearing in the newspapers. We see global leaders speaking about it. So what exactly is multipolarity?
SPEAKER_02Multipolarity in the sense that it's being talked of now is how many different poles or political uh uh points of gravitation are there in the world today? So in during the Cold War, it was a bipolar world between the United States and its allies on one side and the Soviet Union on the other side. And it was a a uh unipolar world, many said, after the Soviet collapse when it was an America-dominated world. And then a multipolar world is you have different poles of power around the world. So some call it spheres of influence. You have uh the United States dominating the Americas, uh say Russia or someone dominating Europe, uh China dominating Asia, and so forth. There are many different concepts of this. So this is multipolarity, where the United States would no longer uh be the dominant power in the world.
SPEAKER_00Aaron Ross Powell Well, I mean, it sounds um uh it sounds at first hearing, it sounds fair. Why not? We're here in the Americas, we should dominate here. We're the biggest country, big economy, big military, and and and why shouldn't Russia have a larger uh footstep in Europe? And and of course, China's a giant in Asia. Why why shouldn't they why shouldn't they dominate there? Why why is that not okay for America?
SPEAKER_02Well, that's the that's how the thinking goes, because you have powers that either are great powers or they pretend to be or purport to be or hope to be, and they're going to want to dominate their own spheres, and it doesn't make it doesn't make any sense a political, financial, uh military, anything else for the United States to be dominating every corner of the world. But we do have to dominate where our interests are. That's not to say that you don't need to respect other powers in their own regions, but the way a lot of people are looking at multipolarity is they presume that Russia should dominate Europe. What kind of Europe dominating Europe?
SPEAKER_00Aaron Powell Right. Oh, interesting. What what problem what problem would that cause for us? I mean, w w Europe is uh is an enormous uh trade partner for the United States, and so what would it mean for Russia to dominate um to dominate Europe? Uh for the Europe let's start with what would it mean for the Europeans, then what does it mean for us?
SPEAKER_02Aaron Ross Powell Well, that's the whole reason we have NATO, it was to prevent Moscow from dominating Europe. Um, Russia never de-Sovietized the way Germany denazified. There was never any mass national uh retrospection, never any screening of people who would be unfit to serve in the new uh post-totalitarian government. So so they still have a big Soviet mentality, and they have a pretense of being a great power to dominate what they say from Dublin to Vladivostok. So that's all the way from the Atlantic across the Eurasian landmass to the Pacific. And that's their concept of multipolarity, which is a which is part of a doctrine that uh Alexander Dugin, a Russian political theorist, geopolitician, who is he's credited with with refining the term, but that means you have different poles of power around the world. But within that Russian um construct is what they call Eurasianism. Russia is a Eurasian power. That's a fact. You know, from Europe all the way to Vladivostok, so you can't argue with that. Uh it it's the logical power for that, for a lot of that part of the world. But Eurasianism is an ideology that goes with multipolarity, where it will uh sort of dominate Asia in concert with China, with India, with what what until recently was the Islamic Republic of Iran, and so forth. And Europe. Well, that means it would dominate a whole lot of our own strategic interests. And that's just not in our national interest to allow Russia to do that. They have no constructive role to play.
SPEAKER_00A lot of people, uh a lot of people, and including inside the uh, you know, in inside uh inside the government, look at NATO, for instance, they say, well, NATO is outdated. And and also NATO isn't really helping. NATO didn't help out much with with Iran and other issues. So what is the purpose? The United States has interests, has very important interests in Europe. And I always contend with people who say, oh, we're just there to protect Europe. Like, no, we're there to protect our own interest, and we expect the Europeans to help us protect their interest as well as our interest. So what's your argument uh against people who say, well, NATO's outdated, we don't need NATO anymore. Either we can do it on our own, or you know, actually, this is naturally Russia's sphere of influence. So let's let's step let's step off of Europe a little bit.
SPEAKER_02Well, there's a lot there. First of all, NATO is outdated. It was developed to contain Soviet communism. It it accomplished that mission. But it's a mutual defense pact among all member nations, and it was designed to defend Europe against a Russian military invasion. But the only time that that Article V Mutual Defense Pact was put in motion was after 9-11 in defense of the United States. And it was our NATO allies played big roles in helping us in Iraq, in Afghanistan with terrorism around the world. Even the countries that we like to bash. I mean, France provided us with important help. Uh the Brits did, of course, the uh a lot of the continental Europeans did, the Danes did, the Lithuanians did, the Polish did. I was in Afghanistan with the Polish and the Lithuanian uh forces back in 2007. They were really gung-ho. You had the military from Finland, which wasn't even part of NATO at the time, doing guard duty so that our forces wouldn't have to do that, and all the way across the board, and to see what the French were able to do for a fraction of the cost uh that it would have taken us to do similar missions. I mean, we we need these allies. We don't necessarily need NATO, we have to modernize NATO. We don't necessarily need all members of NATO because some of them really don't add much value. But it's a valuable alliance and and it's uh it's enshrined in law and in our military tradition, so it's worth keeping, but it's worth reforming.
SPEAKER_00Interesting. So if it's if its primary mission or its original mission is over, what is its mission now? Is it it was uh designed to defend the continent uh against uh uh against the Soviets. Now that the Soviet uh it's 30 years after the Soviet Empire has fallen, what is what could be the mission now that would help secure American interests? Because again, this is one of the big arguments we hear in Washington all the time. Well, NATO NATO's not really, or our NATO allies are not really doing the trick.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Well, they weren't doing it until Trump's first term. Remember, he was just slamming on the Europeans for not doing, pulling their fair share of their GDP as part of their commitments to NATO and mutual defense. He was right. They yelled and screamed and they hated it, but what are almost all of those countries doing now? Under Biden, all those years, they were shifting to do what Trump was demanding of them back in Trump's first term. So not all of them are there yet. Some of them have exceeded what Trump was demanding. Some of them would make super allies if we just had bilateral relations with them, apart from NATO. But really, it's not in our interests to abandon NATO because you don't want Russia to dominate the continental Europe. It's just not in our interest to have that happen.
SPEAKER_00Okay, so Russia still is Russia still is a main threat, at least in Europe. Um I want to move to Asia now for a second, where our our main threat is China. Because again, the the multipolarity idea, it seems, obscures real facts that, first of all, as you and I have discussed uh at great at great length, China is is ruled by a communist party. It's still a communist regime, even though they're keen to make lots of money and take lots of American dollars. Um, this is a big problem for the United States, even if people on both sides of our political divide um say it's not a problem. In fact, we should be coordinating more with China. What is the problem that China poses to us in Asia?
SPEAKER_02First, it poses a huge problem to us here at home. It's been attacking us here at home. You know this. I mean, all reasonable people know this, yet we've kind of let them do it. So how can we trust them as a world power, you know, for better or for worse, if they're doing all the things that they're doing? I mean, just with COVID, with having a three-star general running a biological warfare program, with all of the other, you know, huge technology thefts and the sending in people to American universities with pathogens that can destroy our agriculture. I mean, come on. We can't allow the Chinese Communist Party to do this, and by and it's not an invincible party. We have it, a lot of people have it in their heads. It's invincible. It's always going to be there. This is the same, exact same line that the the George Bush Republicans and the John McCain Republicans and the Democrats all had about the Soviet Union. They could never envision a world without a Soviet Union or a Soviet Union without a Communist Party. And they were loath to do anything about it. I know because I was there working at the time, helping Boris Yeltsin's people to secede from the USSR. We were viewed as dangerous and extreme, but we were right, and when then our view became the norm. If you look at what's happening in China now with Xi Jinping and his consolidation of power, it is so brittle. And he he he has to keep purging and purging and purging his military. And what did Trump just prove the other day, just in the past few weeks? China's weapon systems are useless. Right. China's air defenses are useless, its anti-stealt technology useless, and its communication systems and its its spy camera systems are useless. If we can spy on all the mullahs and the Revolutionary Guard and their offices and their homes inside Iran, we can do the same thing to the Chinese Communist Party. And they know that now. So this has Xi Jinping going out of his mind, along with the fact that Donald Trump now controls more than half of China's oil imports.
SPEAKER_00Between Venezuela and Iran, the Trevor Burrus, Jr.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's about 25% right there, but then the then the the remainder to make over the majority is the Arab oil, where they're going to do what Trump wants them to do.
SPEAKER_00Right. Fascinating. Fascinating. So what so looks though? Does this say that the people who've been promoting multipolarity are saying, look, it the world is a rough place, it's really dangerous out there, we really need to share the world. Look, I'm not uh I'm uh I'm I'm not uh uh sneezing at the dangers that China and Russia still present. They'd be that, well, no, actually, during the course of the Iran campaign, uh Donald Trump has proven that the United States is still the world's leading military as well as economic power.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. I mean, imagine how the world's changing so quickly, though. Who would have, who beyond a few, would have thought just a few years ago that Israel and all the Gulf Arab states would be working together, often coordinating their military and even their intelligence assets, against the Islamic Republic regime of Iran, which is now 95% destroyed. The people, a lot of them arguing multipolarity, were saying there's always going to be an Islamic Republic in Iran. We have to deal with it, we have to appease it, we have to fund it, we have to bring it back into the family of nations again. Well, that's nonsense. Look how easily it went down. What? Five weeks? Still a ways to go, but this is how quickly the world can change. And you knock that, and what are you doing now? You're cutting off, you know, China was buying 90% of Iran's oil at a steep discount because it was sanctioned. With uh with Yuan as w as well as Chinese currency, not petrodars. So now look what's happened. This now means that Xi Jinping can't attack Taiwan the way he had planned to, because he doesn't have a secure supply of oil, among so many other things. He can't project power to defend his friends and allies.
SPEAKER_00Whoa, hold on, I'm gonna come back to that because that's fascinating. So are are are you talking about this a lot? Are other people talking about this about how the Iran campaign has actually affected China's ability to project power in its own sphere of influence? But the idea that, look, I mean, it doesn't mean that the the Taiwan threat is over, but you're saying it's seriously changed.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the whole calculus is thrown off because Xi Jinping had a calendar. He must invade Taiwan by 2027. But that presumed a steady supply of oil from Venezuela, four or five percent of imports, Iran, 20 odd percent of imports, so about a quarter of China's imports were from steeply discounted sanctioned oil from those two countries, which they cannot get anymore. They can buy it at full price, perhaps, but so they were banking on this, and that Communist Party needs stability and predictability. Trump taunted Xi Jinping the other day, said, You want to protect the Straits of Hormuz? Send your Navy over here and protect ships. Right.
SPEAKER_00That was fascinating, saying, Yeah, you know, all the other people can send their ships and protect the Straits of Hormuz. Doesn't matter to us that much, but it matters to you guys. Where are you? Right. It really underscored the it really underscored, in a sense, the weakness of China. So look, so what I I believe that the argument you're making here is not is that that multipolarity has quickly become, due to the Iran uh war and perhaps other things, that multipolarity has already become a thing of the past, that people who are still talking about multipolarity have yet to read the map of what the world looks like after March 2026. So who are the people who are still talking about multipolarity then?
SPEAKER_02Well, it's a big Russian theme, with Alexander Dugan uh the theoretician behind a lot of this, but he's not the originator of it. There are a lot of American voices echoing it. A lot of them have read or claim to have read Dugan's very, very um wordy works on the subject. I've been slogging through and you can you can summarize it in a fairly short order. But the point is, here here you have people who really want Donald Trump to be a leader unchallenged. Make America Great Again unchallenged. Yet some of those same people in the MAGA movement want multipolarity. Well, how can you have America first if you're sharing it with a KGB man like Putin and the Chinese Communist Party and the Islamists in Iran? It's just it's just not going to happen. So you're really surrendering American power to bad influences with this kind of multipolarity advocacy. There could be an American kind of multipolarity if you think about it. Why should we presume that Russia should dominate Europe? Why not have Western Europe dominate Europe? Uh Poland emerging dominating Europe. These these countries are Poland especially and some of the other Central European countries are heading in that direction. Why shouldn't they dominate Europe if if if they're the most dynamic, most committed, most pro-American powers in Europe? Why should we?
SPEAKER_00Yeah. Well, I was just going to say, I was just going to look at Asia, talk about, you know, talk about Japan, especially now under the new prime minister. So this is kind of what our alliance system is about, right? I mean, in in in uh in Europe and in Asia, we have an alliance system. So that's kind of our real multipolarity in the Middle East, um, uh Israel, the the the Gulf states. So it seems that multipolarity is an effort to uh to overturn our alliance system, instead uh uh replace real, genuine American allies with uh with extraordinarily problematic world powers, yeah. Adversarials.
SPEAKER_02Why why would we ever hand over domination of anything to hostile regimes that have nuclear weapons aimed at us, that subvert us every place they can? So why not have a multi multipolar, say, uh multipolarity in Asia where Japan might dominate, which it's now it's come out of its shell. Now it's now it realizes the constructive role it can play. It's broken out of this what we pounded into them since World War II. Uh that means other countries can blossom uh uh you know in Japan's orbit. But you see, just a statement from the Japanese prime minister throws the Chinese Communist Party into fits. Just a single pro-Taiwan statement. So you can see the party's fragile. And if there was a way, so let's, you know what, let's have Japan be our friend and they can be the dominant power in East Asia. Poland and some of the other really solid countries of Western Europe, we should support them to be the dominant powers of Europe. That would be true multipolarity among a Pax Americana that Donald Trump created.
SPEAKER_00Do you think that, um do you think that the Japanese are going to revise their constitution and rebuild their military? I mean, they have the defense forces now, but do you think that they're keen to take a leading role in Asia at this point?
SPEAKER_02Yes, they've broken out of a of this this psyche of helplessness and shame that we we beat into them for all of these years. And it's really good to see because it's a pro-American nationalism that they have. So they they they they imagine being forced to hang your head in shame all of these years. Then that's what they were doing. And it was really, if you think about it, what what completely broke the ice was when Trump made that Pearl Harbor joke. Yeah, that was right in front of the prime minister. You're right, that you're right.
SPEAKER_00You're right. That was that was that was very interesting. Right.
SPEAKER_02As only he could do. So he's he's basically here's the president of the United States joking about Pearl Harbor to the Prime Minister of Japan in front of the whole world, and it's like, look, that was a previous generation. Had nothing to do with it. We're all moved past that. Let's just be friends and just enjoy what's ahead of us instead of lament what happened before. So that was a real, that was a real turning point for Japan. So if you so if you if we promote multipolarity on these guidelines, and you can see from Trump's first term when he's saying we need strong allies to act in their own sovereign interests, this would be a multipolarity a la Donald Trump, not a multipolarity from Putin. Because the multipolarity that we're talking about from the people who support or who follow or get inspiration from the Russian geopolitician uh Alexander Dugan, that's just that's just uh a freshly coded version of Soviet multipolarity, which is the Primakov doctrine. The last foreign intelligence chief of the KGB, Yevgeny Primakov, when he became Russian foreign minister and prime minister just before Putin, he revived this old Soviet concept of multipolarity. Dugin is just putting a theory behind the practical aspects of that multipolarity to give it some mysticism and some you know some culture and so forth. And this is because of garbage that's being repeated now in mega circles.
SPEAKER_00It's it's insane. Right, to give it some social media cachet as well. Right, but this is what strikes me to hear people in in and mega circles, uh, especially. I mean, you know, you're you're you're rehashing, you're rehashing a doctrine here that was started by a Soviet spy chief. That's that's not a good place for us, yeah, not a good place for us to be.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And then they're calling all these things Jewish plots. This is the hysterical part of this multipolar stuff. Yevgeny Primakov came up with this, right? The last the last foreign intelligence KGB chief. So it's the Primakov doctrine. Yevgeny Primikov was born, his name was Jorim Finkelstein. Really? Yes. So so so all of these lunatics out there pushing this.
SPEAKER_00Wow, that I that that I had that I didn't know. They're pushing the Finkelstein doctrine. Yeah. That's very good. Um, Mike, uh one last question. What Donald Trump is building now, just as he did uh during his first term, the Abraham Accords was an alliance system across the Middle East. And it was useful because it showed, um, because it showed who U.S. allies were. There was Israel, there was the Gulf states, um uh Morocco. What Donald Trump is building now with the Iran campaign, um, with pressuring NATO allies, with helping Japan rise in a good way, um, will this uh will this endure? Will this outlast Donald Trump's second and final term?
SPEAKER_02It depends on who succeeds Donald Trump. If he's if he's succeeded by an anti-Trumper, with you know it's gonna it's gonna all go back to sharing the world with all the bad guys. If it goes to some people in the MAGA movement who have this Finkelstein-Primikov doctrine of multipolarity, uh then it's gonna hand much of the world back to our adversaries. If it goes to people who are really hammering out a Trump vision on foreign policy and grand strategy, then it's going to move forward to our benefit.
SPEAKER_00Mike Waller, thank you so much as always for being with us here on Roots, Rights, and Reason. And thanks to all of you for watching. We'll see you in our next episode.