Today’s international order is shaped by “orbital bipolarity,” dominated by the United States and China, with secondary powers navigating their influence; Europe is limited in its role, China acts cautiously, Russia capitalizes on Western hesitation, and Ukraine remains trapped in the conflict.
U.S. President Trump and Russian President Putin sat down with senior advisers from each country at a highly anticipated summit in Alaska, August 15, 2025.
The present international order is becoming increasingly defined by “orbital bipolarity,” a system dominated by the United States and China, around which secondary powers revolve, rather than by multipolarity.
The Alaska meeting exposed this reality. By welcoming an alleged war criminal (ICC wanted) onto the red carpet, Donald Trump signaled that Washington’s claim to moral leadership had yielded to expedience, reducing the language of principles to an admission that raw power, not justice, sets the current rules.
The Hegemon in Decline
Washington’s course has been deliberate. It offered a velvet glove to the aggressor and an iron fist to the victim, presenting both as if they stood on equal footing. Trump’s shift from dismissing Volodymyr Zelenskyy as “a mere comedian and a dictator” to treating Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin with a smile and deference that inflated Russia’s stature exposes the logic behind his policy: great powers defend interests, not principles.
Anchorage marked a return to the ordinary grammar of international relations, stripped of post-Cold War illusions. The surprise is not America’s disregard of Ukraine but that its commitment was ever taken as genuine: the same power spent two decades promising Afghanistan a democratic future, only to depart in a helicopter scramble that mocked its Saigon precedent.
Debates over Trump’s intent—whether a deeper fixation on the Indo-Pacific or a quest for a Nobel Prize—miss the larger point. Ukraine has become the case for abandoning the façade of moral leadership. After decades of costly interventions dressed in humanitarian language, America now makes plain that it will act only where its core interests are at stake.
For the U.S., the gesture is a strained bid to assert hegemony precisely as its weight is questioned. By resorting to pressure, Washington reveals both the reach and the fragility of its supremacy to allies and rivals alike.
The Indispensable Outsider
China observes with the calm of a player watching an opponent trade a queen for a pawn. Its message is unmistakable: conflicts will be shaped by Chinese interests, on Chinese terms, at a pace China chooses.
Yet Beijing’s reluctance to assume a mediating role exposes the boundaries of its ambition. A state that proclaims a “community of common destiny for mankind” shows little interest in bearing the burdens of global leadership so long as the war touches its interests. Wang Yi was explicit: Russia’s defeat in Ukraine would damage China’s position. Above him, Xi Jinping seems to have judged that playing world policeman is costly, unrewarding, and irrelevant to advancing China’s standing.
What Beijing has cultivated instead is the role of indispensable outsider: too powerful to ignore, yet unaccountable for resolution. It mouths respect for sovereignty while deepening trade with Moscow and positioning itself as the voice of a non-Western order. Its strength lies in calculated ambiguity—neither peace-broker nor combatant, China gains leverage by withholding commitment and, to a degree, still biding its time.
Solidarity without Strategy
Europe provides the most tragicomic subplot, reduced to a bystander issuing appeals no one heeds. Brussels and national capitals have squandered decades of influence with striking ineptitude.
Historians will puzzle over how European leaders tied Ukraine’s fate to China’s position, outsourcing continental security to a realist power while sparing others from scrutiny. Brussels lectures Beijing on its ties with Moscow while offering no peace plan of its own, pressing for concessions never demanded from Washington or Delhi—neither of which has severed relations with Putin. This stance has hampered the EU’s China policy for the past three years.
The strategy rests on incoherence: aid calibrated to prevent collapse but never to secure victory, sustaining a costly stalemate that enables speeches about solidarity while evading the choices real leadership requires, all while shifting responsibility onto a stronger power in the hope that citizens do not notice their leaders’ own incapacity.
From sanctions design to arms logistics, the script belonged to Joe Biden. EU states supply weapons, financial packages, and humanitarian aid, but their role remains irrelevant to the war’s outcome. Military support arrives without troops, sanctions are riddled with exemptions, and trade with Russia persists where it serves European interests. Principles reduced to stagecraft.
A Cause without Agency
The Ukrainian cause, however brutal the invasion and however reprehensible Putin’s imperial ambitions, was tied to the one actor willing to claim its defense: Europe. But Europe followed rather than led. No leader articulated a vision of what Ukraine’s survival should mean beyond automatic alignment with Washington and hollow cries of an unquestionable victory. Without the Pentagon’s shield, industrial base, and diplomatic leverage, Brussels had no independent path to victory or peace, leaving Kyiv to shoulder the weight of promises it cannot deliver.
Europe’s “coalition of the willing” absence from serious peace negotiations underlines its impotence. It lacks the means to bring Moscow to the table—military power, economic leverage, political will. Sanctions depend on U.S. enforcement, weapons on U.S. coordination, diplomacy on U.S. talking points. For Ukraine, this means a war managed elsewhere, while its own fate is reduced to the variable of American resolve.
Enlargement adds condescension. Balkan candidates remain stuck in procedural limbo, while Ukraine—at war, scarred by corruption and fragile institutions—is paraded through a VIP lane. The promise of membership is symbolic, a morale boost at best, but devoid of credibility. European leaders have emptied themselves.
Brzezinski warned in The Grand Chessboard (1997) that a “truly united and powerful EU” could one day emerge as America’s geopolitical rival; Kaplan echoed in The Revenge of Geography (2012) that deeper EU integration would heighten U.S.–Europe tensions. Yet Brussels ignored these cautions, ignored Obama’s pivot to Asia, and called Trump’s coercion a success when it was forced to divert 5 percent of GDP to American weapons. For Ukraine, the result is clear: its struggle is fought in the shadow of an ally too weak to lead and too dependent to act alone.
For others, Ukraine is an opportunity: for America, a testing ground for weapons and a way to bleed Russia without casualties; for China, proof of Western fragility; for Europe, a platform for moral posturing without strategy. Only for Ukrainians is the war about Ukraine.
Degeneration Weaponized
Beyond Trump, the real winner is Putin. In terms of nominal GDP, Russia is a middling power, yet the invasion of Ukraine has forced the world to treat Moscow as if it were still the Soviet Union. Through a readiness to absorb vast losses, Putin restored Russia’s centrality in ways diplomacy never achieved, turning a declining petrostate into an indispensable actor, setting the terms.
Little attention has been paid to his own xenophobic justification, settling instead on the claim that NATO expansion was to blame. On February 24, 2022, he declared war and argued: “Of course, the question is not about NATO itself. It merely serves as a tool of U.S. foreign policy. The problem is that in territories adjacent to Russia, which I must note is our historical land, a hostile anti-Russia is taking shape.”
Putin has since weaponized Western restraint. By betting that democracies lack the stamina for prolonged conflict and mass casualties, he exposed the weakness of post-modern warfare: societies unwilling to countenance costs their adversaries accept. While Western leaders wrangle over each weapons shipment, he proceeded with destruction.
Ukraine, meanwhile, is trapped in a geopolitical purgatory—exploited by its former colonizer, despised by Washington, and tied to a hopeless European bloc. Zelenskyy has become less a leader than a supplicant, obliged to show gratitude for aid that arrives with bureaucratic inertia.
Two Anchors, Many Shadows
Today’s order is best described as orbital bipolarity: a world with two anchors—the U.S. and China—with secondary states revolving within their gravitational pull. These orbiters shift alignments and trade across poles, yet none can redefine the system without reference to its dual core.
Unlike the Cold War’s rigid blocs, orbital bipolarity is fluid. The EU, India, Gulf monarchies, Indonesia, Brazil, and even Russia retain autonomy in some areas, recalibrating their positions issue by issue. It is a bipolarity of convenience, held together by two cores and many orbiters.
This model explains why the system is not multipolar: many states influence events, but none sets the architecture. It also shows how today diverges from the Cold War—secondary actors are no longer passive clients but orbiters whose movements complicate the balance, even as the gravitational pull of Washington and Beijing remains decisive.
The post-Cold War vision of order, therefore, rooted in rules proved temporary, sustained only while the U.S. enjoyed dominance and the will to enforce it. With both gone, history has resumed its older form: great-power rivalry, spheres of influence, and a realpolitik so ruthless it renders John Mearsheimer idealistic.
The tragedy is not simply that Ukraine is sacrificed to this logic, but that the West—divided—no longer pretends to be unsettled by it. Future generations will recall this moment for its abdication. Europe ignored Monnet’s 1943 warning: “There will be no peace in Europe if states are reconstructed on the basis of national sovereignty.” What collapsed was not Ukraine, but Europe’s claim to purpose.
