The US-Israeli war on Iran has stopped—perhaps for now—and what emerges are the contours of a new world order. However, this will not be a new world system. The difference between the two is critical to understanding this conflict and what follows.
In the novel The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa—later adapted into a brilliant film by Visconti—the young Tancredi Falconeri expresses to his uncle, the Prince of Salina, how the aristocracy must face the changes being brought about by the revolution led by Garibaldi: “If we want things to remain the same, everything must change.”
This could be the essence of the rapid developments we see in the geopolitical arena today. Borders are being contested. Resources rearranged. Currencies adapted. But the result of these changes will not significantly alter the world system, only its ordering. Before continuing, I think it’s necessary to expand upon what I mean by these two concepts and how they differ.
The World System is the backbone upon which our culture is built. I understand culture as the living praxis of a society. The backbone of modern societies is the financial system, its energy sources, and the nation-state power arrangement.
There are other important elements, such as digital technologies—whose exponential growth is tied to the financial system and energy sources—that are incorporating themselves into this backbone, and which, in turn, might render obsolete the current form of the financial system and the nation-state. But we are not quite there yet.
I consider this to be a system because these three elements were developed in unison and are interdependent. Of course, this did not happen in an ideological vacuum. But it is arguable whether philosophy was responding to this development or driving it. Perhaps they “arose together,” to use a Taoist concept. This would mean that the ideas that fueled its development are inseparable from the system itself.
If this is a system, then it has spread and is at work in almost every corner of the world. It does not work everywhere without friction, but other than perhaps a handful of semiautonomous communities, I don’t think there is any place in which fiat currency and the same energy sources are not used. The nation-state is the most contested and the least crucial element. The system only needs a state, not the nation.
In this definition, the world order is the international political field that emerges out of this world system. That is, how different nation-states, or simply states, arrange themselves to deal with each other. These states, being based on what has today become an abstract concept—the nation—have limitations that the financial system does not. This, and the control of energy resources, create tensions within the system that lead to conflicts and to the succession of different world orders.
The transition to a multipolar world order seems now inevitable. The unprovoked US-Israeli war on Iran is proving to be a catalyst for many of the forces that were in motion for at least the last two decades. The rise of new centers of military power, the subjective application of international law, the struggle for energy, and the transition away from a dollar-based economy have all been accelerated by this war.
The emergence of a multipolar world order, understood as an order with several centers of influence dealing with each other on equal terms—at least supposedly—seems to be a point of agreement among many competing narratives.
It is the discourse that emerges from the members of the BRICS organization. Leading that discourse are the Russians, but they are not alone in it. Alexander Dugin’s concept of civilizational poles is a more elegant, philosophical way of proposing the same. There are other public commentators, more geopolitically minded, like Pepe Escobar or Arnaud Bertrand, who defend multipolarity.
But this is not only a discourse found on the margins of power. Hrvoje Moric shows in a well-researched article that some form of multipolarity has been present in Russian institutional discourse for a long time, even during the Soviet era. The same has been the case in Chinese state institutions, especially recently.
What might be more surprising—and Moric goes to great lengths to demonstrate this with sufficient documentation—is that a transition from a unipolar world dominated by the U.S. to a multipolar world has also been part of mainstream Western thinking for a while.
For example, Moric quotes an article from the Council on Foreign Relations’ publication, Foreign Affairs, in 1973, which clearly states: “So there remain the practical alternatives of a multipolar balance of power or a pluralism of unaligned states. We are asking, then, whether the United States can live in a situation of general unalignment which its own conduct would materially help to establish.”
The apparent agreement among different political stances and the historical presence in their discourse regarding the need to move to a multipolar world order leads some commentators, like Moric himself or James Corbett from the Corbett Report, to conclude that there must be some general plan or understanding—however abstract—for it.
They argue that the purpose of this multipolar world order is to be a step toward a global form of governance based on regional powers. They quote, among many others, Xi Jinping’s Global Governance Initiative proposed at the 2025 SCO summit. Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, India, Pakistan, Iran, and Belarus are members of the SCO. This initiative is in line with others from the U.N. and Davos.
Other commentators, such as Simon Dixon, hold a similar view of a planned transition, albeit from a different angle. They argue that what he calls the “Financial-Industrial Complex,” which is not nation-bound, is pushing this move in order to continue generating financial profit. According to him, the Iran war is a step towards the reconstruction and stabilization of the Middle East and its emergence as an important regional pole in a future stablecoin-denominated financial system.
However, Alexander Dugin would disagree with this. Civilizational poles are the basis for his concept of a multipolar world order. These civilizational poles are, according to him, sociopolitical entities that emerge after the failure of the nation-state—a Western European political model which is not automatically valid everywhere else.
These poles are sovereign, and the basis of their legitimacy is that they encompass the lands and people that are inheritors of a particular civilizational tradition, such as China, India, or the “Islamic World.” They are not, in any way, a preliminary step toward global governance; rather, he posits them as its antithesis.
Others, like the Council on Foreign Relations, Pepe Escobar, Arnaud Bertrand, or the Chinese institutional discourse, see multipolarity as the logical step after the end of U.S. hegemony—however, each with a particular undertone. The CFR, considered a transatlantic think tank, would be more inclined to agree with the concept of global governance, while Escobar emphasizes the end of empire, and China a pragmatic approach to stability and trade.
It would seem that there is a general understanding that the unipolar world is over, and that the time of a multipolar world has come. Even U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio tacitly agreed in an interview that unipolarity was actually an abnormal phenomenon. The Iran war has only pushed further what was already happening.
The question then is: is it a planned transition with certain spheres of power plotting for it, or is it the natural step after the end of an abnormal unipolarity?
Here is where my proposed definition of a world system and world order becomes relevant. I would say that it is both. If we look at the question through the lens of the World System, then we necessarily see a continuation. If we look at it from the perspective of world order, we might see some clear breaks and distinctions.
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The main change I foresee is that war will increasingly be considered stupid. The highly interconnected, just-in-time, global commerce network is too fragile and important to permit serious disruption. At the same time, cheap and highly effective precision weaponry is proliferating and raising the risks faced by any military aggressor. Militarized foreign policy is going to go the way of dueling and jousting. There will always be low-level violence in the world, but that is a matter for policing, a much less expensive endeavor than global arms racing and full scale warfare.
Yep, that is why London and Paris won’t intervene is the Kaiser moves into Serbia. I bet 1915 is going to be a great year.
*if the Kaiser moves
I would counter by observing that “dueling and jousting” were exercises in dominance management by aristocratic or quasi-aristocratic elites. Today’s analogs of dueling and jousting would be financial and business contests, also exercises in dominance management. One “force” is supplanted by another “force.”
The higher order versions of “dueling and jousting,” indeed the ultimate expressions of such, are warfare and other forms of organized violence. Contests for dominance between individuals escalate to contests for dominance between groups, eventually culminating in wars between nations and alliances.
The same pattern as above applies to international economics. “Financial warfare” has become formalized today. It is still “warfare,” the purpose of which is still the regulation of dominance.
Even though some of the rules are changing, it is still the same old game.
Stay safe.
Speaking of the obsolescence of dueling, I must admit that I have not yet read any of Dugin’s books, but I have read about Dugin in the news. Specifically, I read about how an attempted assassination of him, by car bomb, killed his daughter instead. It seems clear that what Locke called “an appeal to Heaven” – organized attempts to kill fellow humans – either specifically or en masse to settle political disputes – is still very relevant today, as more recent events also show.
Many – maybe even most – consider war stupid, even now, though there are exceptions such as rabid nationalists and grifters who profit at no risk to themselves.
Doesn’t seem to stop the minority from dragging the rest into war, though.
I have read a relatively large amount of Dugin (meaning I have read about 25 books, so a fraction of the Dugin corpus, which is enormous, but a lot more than most people), and for the record his “civilizational poles”, going by memory, are as follows.
Russia
China
India
The United States
Europe
Persia
The non-Persian Muslim world (incipient — not yet formed)
Latin America (not yet formed)
Sub-Saharan Africa (not yet formed)
One of my favourite Dugin quotes is “Italian brainrot is much more than it seems to be. It is new generation of weapon. I had recently very disturbing experience. Hard to forget.”
https://x.com/AGDugin/status/1954889189578969129
I have never looked at his social media/internet activity.
He does speak Italian.
He does but “Italian brainrot” referred to something worse that emerged on tiktok and the like
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mLPEuB3rZbw
Why Dr. Dugin found this so disturbing? Who knows but it seems that like his mind also got fried by AI slop.
Whatever that is, I am sorry that I looked at it.
I’ve never read Dugin, just around him, but this is the interesting thing about all the social-cycle / comparative theories. There actually is a consensus on some basic things (e.g. generations as the temporal unit, behavioral solidarity / asabiyyah as the elan vital of historical groups, etc.) But there’s also a lot of fuzziness and interpretation.
It’s just my personal take, but I think a civilizational pole / state has to be built around an identity that has made at least 1 full pass through a grand cycle: from tribes through empire and disintegration, about 12 centuries or more. At the same time, newer layers don’t actually destroy or subsume earlier ones; they just ironically add links to the global system.
So I would personally disagree with Dugin that some of these will ever form 1 pole, though they could still be highly cooperative. The Middle-East in particular, with most of the current states (except the Levantine ones funny-enough) centered on a distinct civilization, will always be very multipolar. Similarly, Peru will never be the same as Mexico even if the Spanish made them both predominantly Hispanic Catholic, nor would West Africa, Zimbabwe, or Ethiopia have any real reason to fuse.
The really interesting one, if you take this approach, is that even Europe will always be split somewhat between the Classical Mediterranean and the North (which really doesn’t have an agreed descriptor yet). The US is another interesting one because it definitely could be a civilization state, but that would require somehow restoring the old native nations as cultural & political units, then attaching the non-Amerindian masses to them.
In his book Civilizations of the New World (in the Noomakhia series), Dugin actually treats Central and South America as two different, but related, civilizational zones, since they are based on the core of the former Aztec/Mayan (Nahuatl) and Incan civilizations, a division that was later reproduced in the administrative divisions of the Spanish Empire (Brazil is a separate case; so is Argentina since the Indian influence is smallest there), Central America may actually have more civilizational “depth,” because the Iberian and Nahuatl worldviews are weirdly similar and easily syncretize..
Now, regions like Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa are INCIPIENT civilizational poles; they don’t actually form them, in part for the reasons you mention. They may form them in the future. I haven’t read his book on sub-Saharan Africa yet, though.
Virtually none of his books have been translated into English by the way.
All civilizational order, having grown alongside natural systems (stable planet processes), will only survive if they can make the rapid changes needed to adapt to the real problems posed by climate change.
In addition to making rapid changes needed to adapt to accelerating climate change, increasingly chaotic weather, and the many known and unknown climate tipping points waiting to be triggered, all civilizational order must rapidly adapt to levels of resource depletion moved forward by decades as a result of even the current levels of destruction … and Trump’s War goes on. In general adapting to change is difficult, even impossible for some. Adapting to rapid changes, and what amounts to a step change moving the scarcity of energy, and scarcities of a long list of critical industrial resources could prove terminal to much of the present civilizational order. Radical revision of the who’s who of world politics might not be the most consequential result of Trump’s folly.
The US may have accepted the idea of a multipolar world but they had their own idea of how it was going to work. So they said that on some issues that they would attack China & get in their faces while on other issues they would cooperate with China if it was in the interest of the US. Yes, this was an official position though they could not understand why China would not go along with it. Another was the use of Coalitions of the Willing with each call for one would depend on assembling different countries to help their cause. This has not worked out at all with the US war in Iran as other countries have said count me out. Self-serving is the only term that comes to mind to describe how the US would accept multipolarity.
I’m not as het up about multipolarity as some here are. The world was multipolar in 1914 and 1939, how’d that work out for everybody? And conceding that my government (U.S.) doesn’t represent my interests as a non-wealthy American very well, I don’t think anybody else’s government will represent me better.
Mostly agree: one could have a sort of beneficent hegemon in a unipolar order or a thuggish one; you can have a successfully functioning concert of whatever in a multipolar order or a chaotic world where everyone is trying to backstab each other. The good versions of both unipolar and multipolar orders are hard to achieve and, if anything, a beneficent hegemon is easier to get than a durable “concert” if only because herding many cats to behave is likely more challenging.
Only partially true I think. by observable facts, it looks like in China political is dominant over wealthy interests and has incentives to placate the masses. In Russia, there seems to be a greater effort to aleviate the interests of the oligarchy, if you read Dances with Bears. The US on the other hand… And the US centered oligarchy and the satellite compradror elites would rather prefer their modus operandi prevails – never mind taking protection money from everyone else…
And I think this is where the civilizational element comes forth and differentiates. And the US, with its only 250 years of existence, mostly spent on a moving border, settling and killing, is not really a civilization, it has no depth, no Asabiyyah, and furthermore, is being atomized.
“The transition to a multipolar world order seems now inevitable”
When was the world uni-polar??? Is the polarity between the possessed and dispossessed? The non-tangible and tangible economy? the owners and the debtors? Those with rights to exist who suborn others of their existence?
Is the man-made tool of finance used for supremacy and suppression or progress and enlightenment? sameness or diversity?
There is no good reason not to have a 1-world-currency sans hegemon, but how do you pull it off?
National currencies are akin to how many civilizations had different weights and measures once upon a time.
I’ve always thought it’s funny that in theory, it’s always just been Keynes’ bancor, but there’s no way any sovereign country would agree to the necessary arbitration and penalties for trade imbalances. To get rid of the imbalances would require getting rid of over-production, and (if you think Marx was right on the point) that would mean global socialism to a degree not even China has achieved.
That said, and this is something the finance people would have to explain to me, I’ve never understood why most trade and contracts are still denominated in a single currency, instead of a standard basket of currencies. I guess it’s partly just an insane project to update all the accounting, and partly that the money markets would need to be deep enough across all the currencies?
Back when European countries all had national currencies, you could pencil-whipped going from the UK to say Germany with half a dozen bureau de changes in countries between.