There is no doubt that the world has entered a new era of multipolarity. While the United States remains powerful, it is increasingly counterbalanced by a China-led global order. This isn’t just about alternative trade routes, supply chains, or state-backed investments in the developing world. It also reflects the emergence of a global coalition between the structurally marginalized in the West and the postcolonial South.
Together, these overlapping groups form what is now called the Global South. Unlike the Third World project of the mid-20th century, which emerged from anticolonial struggles and sought to navigate a shifting Cold War order, the Global South project that began taking shape in the early 1990s confronts a different pressure: neoliberal restructuring. In this sense, the Global South is not a coherent geographic or class-based formation, but a shifting space of struggle—where elements of the North appear in the South, and vice versa.
This is why moments like Occupy Wall Street (2011) and Black Lives Matter (2013) resonated beyond US borders. Occupy challenged neoliberal economic organization; BLM took aim at America’s racial regime. Both revealed a fracture in the West that spoke to the experiences of the global majority. And while a China-led order is far from utopian, it gestures toward a more pluralistic political terrain—where multiple configurations of democracy and capitalism coexist, and no single power dictates the terms of modernity.
This, precisely, is what makes it so threatening to the West. The dominance of the US has been about not only material power but maintaining a definition of humanity grounded in whiteness. The West’s current configuration of democracy and capitalism is entangled with this racial vision. As the American philosopher Lewis Gordon reminds us, “a true, new beginning stimulates anxiety because it appears, at least at the level of identity, as suicide.”
We are seeing this anxiety take form: Existential fractures in the transatlantic alliance, resurgent white nationalism, and a frantic attempt to reassert control through trade wars and isolationist policies. Recall how the British historian Arnold Toynbee once put it, “Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.”
From Obama to Biden, and especially under Trump, the US has struggled to manage its decline. Trump’s approach, however, is more unilateral and maximalist: He has abandoned traditional alliances in an effort to reimpose American hegemony through economic coercion. But this is no longer possible. The United States cannot continue to play both global leader and imperial overlord. Its postwar architecture of international governance—designed to stabilize the world while preserving US dominance—has exhausted its financial and moral legitimacy.
Yet the West’s strategic imagination remains locked in a binary worldview. For the US, multipolarity has always signaled danger. In 2010, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice warned that multipolarity meant “rivalry, competing interests, and—at its worst—competing values.”
This helps explain the ongoing anxiety about BRICS. In Western analysis, BRICS is framed as a geopolitical bloc, a threat to the liberal international order. But that view risks missing something more interesting: that BRICS is a transitional formation, a forerunner of a multipolar world that may, eventually, render such blocs obsolete.
Even so, the transition is far from smooth. In February 2025, The Washington Post ran a headline declaring, “Trump Revives Monroe Doctrine in U.S. Relations with Western Hemisphere.” In this framework, multipolarity is not an opportunity but a threat to be managed through spheres of influence and containment.
But containment will not work. The world has already outgrown the US vision of liberal order. The empire is collapsing under the weight of its contradictions—unable to offer peace, prosperity, or even ideological coherence. The Global South, in contrast, offers the outline of a different vision: one free of empire, more open to pluralism, and capable of naming corporate and state violence as forms of domination.
Still, we should not be naive. Multipolarity is not automatically emancipatory. It can reproduce the same hierarchies under different banners. The Global South, if it is to be more than a rhetorical device, must hold new powers to account—rejecting both Western imperialism and new forms of authoritarian capitalism.
We must contend with a sobering reality: The US may be willing to destroy the world before it surrenders its imperial self-image. This suicidal impulse—visible in its economic warfare and cultural nihilism—should not be underestimated. If empire cannot imagine a future in which it does not lead, it may instead choose to make that future unlivable for everyone else.
We are entering a new terrain of struggle, not a utopia. And that terrain demands clarity, coordination, and vision. If the US empire is willing to end the world before it ends itself, then our challenge is not only to survive its decline but to shape what comes next.
That task will not fall to states alone. African governments, through institutions like the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), must move with speed. If they are to shape multipolarity, they must build new regional institutions, assert economic sovereignty, and humanise Africans, not just as an anti-Western posture, but as a constructive project rooted in the context Africa finds itself in. Multipolarity will not be given. It must be made.
This will require struggle—not only against imperial holdovers, but against our own inertia. The end of the US empire is not the end of the world. But what kind of world emerges next will depend on what we are prepared to fight for.
