In the near future, the supposed “multipolar” world has been deferred, giving way instead to “orbital bipolarity”—a system in which global politics and industry are pulled into competing gravitational fields centered on the United States and China. Multilateralism has become inert, and every other power now orbits these two anchors while maintaining the fiction of choice and autonomy.
(Photo provided by Sebastian Contin Trillo-Figueroa)
In Hangzhou, there is a room where twenty world leaders last sat in 2016. The chairs remain exactly where they were located—including the two at the center, placed for symmetry, as if Obama and Xi had just stepped out for a break and never returned.
The Chinese hosts embalmed the G20 as a perfect crime scene of diplomacy. But step inside and the silence speaks louder than any summit communiqué ever did. This is both a monument to what was, but also a tombstone for an idea that will not easily revive.
Call it what it is: the world now operates under orbital bipolarity. Multilateralism is inert, and we currently live under a system with two gravitational centers—Washington and Beijing—around which every other power spins while fantasizing they have a choice, a belief exposed whenever the institutions meant to arbitrate global affairs meet without the actors who decide them.
The fiction still performs itself at summits. November 2025 Johannesburg offered the latest scene: a G20 held without Trump or Xi. Washington did not even bother to send a representative. The forum that once claimed to coordinate global crises now convenes in the absence of those who decide outcomes, leaving the remainder to negotiate shadows of choices made elsewhere.
The G20, G7, and all the alphabet soup institutions designed by intergovernmental diplomacy read like nostalgia for a world that could still agree on collective arithmetic. Today the math is simpler: two anchors, many orbiters. Trump himself laid it bare last October 30 in South Korea, acknowledging China’s great power status: “THE G2 WILL BE CONVENING SHORTLY!”
(Source: The White House https://x.com/WhiteHouse/status/1983704240691564995)
Trump has made the transition complete. Every global question reduces to how the United States and China will react. Ukraine, Gaza, the South China Sea; AI, semiconductors, trade—all decisions orbit these two poles. Between them lies the void once filled by multilateral institutions.
Command rests on three pillars: economy, technology, military. By these measures, only two powers qualify. The rest are pretenders or tributaries. Russia wields nukes but begs Beijing and Delhi for cash. Europe enacts regulations but relies on Washington for protection. India grows but cannot secure its own backyard. The gap between the G2 and everyone else is widening every single day.
The Rulers
The following contrast defines it all: Washington demands vassals, Beijing cultivates orbiters.
Across the Pacific, Washington no longer bothers with ceremony. Trump’s diplomacy is realpolitik on steroids, stripped of pretense. The Alaska meeting of August 2025 settled the question: Trump received Putin as an honored ally, war crimes indictment and all. What that red carpet announced to the world was that moral leadership was always a costume, and Washington had worn it too long. Trump did not invent this cruelty: he simply tore away the rhetoric that disguised American foreign policy for decades.
However, the “Trump Corollary” purports that America remains the most indispensable nation. The irony is that China watches with serenity. Beijing understood years ago that Washington’s contradictions do the work for them. America needs compliance, loyalty sworn and vassalage. You’re either in or you’re the target. There is no middle ground, no room for ambiguity. America has perfected coercive extraction, and imperium now runs on subordination.
China has become a measured deterrence virtuoso. Its power lies not in replacing Washington but in outlasting its mistakes. Beijing can afford patience because its realm is psychological before territorial—a civilization beyond a Westphalian nation-state. It aspires to a “community of shared destiny for mankind:” for the time being, China prefers orbiters, not vassals.
Simultaneously, Beijing still performs the rituals of inclusion. The preserved G20 hall is proof: the tomb is still decorated because the relics serve the narrative. China respects the forms of global cooperation even as it rewrites their content.
This reverence for form coexists with deliberate absence: Xi skipped both the 2023 New Delhi summit and the 2025 Johannesburg meeting, sending his premier instead, even while curating the venue at the International Expo Center as a frozen tableau of multilateral unity.
The message is explicit to every visitor walking through Hangzhou’s silence: China conserves the stage even as it withdraws from the play, preserving the funeral rites of multilateralism while ensuring the inheritance flows to itself.
The Orbiters
The G2 functions, nevertheless, through their mutual containment. Meanwhile, each measures success by how many orbiters it can attract or prevent from defecting. Global governance is no longer about rules but about orbits. The UN, the WTO, the IMF—all have become administrators of a game whose rules are written elsewhere.
In this scenario, Europe orbits without a defined trajectory. It still invokes the multilateral spirit as if reciting prayers to a dead god could bring resurrection. Its leaders hold summits about summits, reshuffle money, rebrand programs while keeping content identical; yet, the shell remains empty.
The tragedy is that Europe was imagined by the same leaders still commanding it today as the third pole, the normative conscience of global affairs. Inexplicably, after failing, they remain in charge. What survives is a bloc with flashy slogans but no capacity for independent action: Europe intensely criticizes China’s partnership with Russia while buying solar panels from the former and energy from the latter. It condemns U.S. unilateralism while relying on American protection. It insists on autonomy it cannot afford and will not fight for.
If Washington and Beijing are the twin anchors of orbital bipolarity, Europe has become its moral ornament. More autonomy now lies in Ankara, Riyadh, Delhi, Jakarta, Brasília—each calibrating relations between the two poles with transactional care. These powers understand what Europe refuses to admit: influence derives from leverage, not virtue.
Orbital Bipolarity is Flexible and Disloyal
Orbital bipolarity is not anymore ideological, replaced by transactional flexibility—a marketplace of alignments where values are optional extras. States are pulled not by allegiance but by necessity: markets, investment, security guarantees. Russia orbits China out of need. Japan orbits the U.S. out of fear. Europe orbits both out of routine. The innovation is that the system no longer demands loyalty.
During the Cold War, deviation was punished. Now ambiguity can be rewarded. States sign defence deals with Washington and trade MoUs with Beijing in the same week. Everyone pretends, and the system is thriving on it. Each power claims agency, but their movements are foreseeable, constrained by competing gravities from the two anchors.
This structure exposes the narrative fictions of multipolarity, which presupposes centers of comparable mass. Yet none of the orbiters can shape the system without reference to Washington or Beijing. The G2 already governs by gravity. The others are witnesses to a system they cannot escape and did not choose. Even Russia’s military adventurism and India’s economic ambitions operate within this binary frame.
In Hangzhou, the empty G20 chairs look like ghosts of an abandoned faith. The tea grows cold in cups set for twenty, but only two matter now. The site whispers a message: “Here,” the plaque might read, “the world still pretended to be one.” That is also the essence of the new bipolarity. The mausoleum stands open for visitors who want to remember when cooperation seemed possible. The doors will not close because the dead need no locks. They need only silence, and that the hall provides in abundance.
