It’s time for you to face the facts: the track record of “multipolarists” predicting the imminent end of U.S./Western primacy has been consistently VERY poor.Israel has tamed Iran and Hamas and Hezbollah and the Gazan people are on their last legs. If they survive at all it will be in tents rather than dense cities as before. At every turn, the conflicts are shifting from balance toward overmatch and escalation control in favor of the West/US/Israel.
Since roughly the mid-2010s, we’ve seen repeated claims that Iraq/Afghanistan, the 2008 crisis, Syria, Ukraine, or China’s rise would mark a decisive terminal decline, yet in practice the U.S. and its allies have retained escalation control, alliance cohesion, financial centrality, and unmatched intelligence-strike capabilities while rivals absorb disproportionate costs for challenging the system. The mistake isn’t noticing Western contradictions, it’s assuming those contradictions imply fragility rather than durability, and confusing loud resistance with actual system-overturning power. What recent years suggest is not that the empire is collapsing, but that it has shifted from overextension to selective enforcement, which is precisely the mode that makes repeated predictions of imminent demise look increasingly disconnected from observed outcomes.
“Multipolarists” and self-described anti-imperialists fundamentally misread Western restraint as terminal decline rather than adaptation. China remains a regional rather than global military challenger whose only plausible path to victory runs through the Taiwan Strait and whose demographic, alliance, and structural economic limits make it incapable of replacing the United States as a system-organizing power; the deeper implication is that many people invested emotionally and ideologically in the idea of inevitable Western decline are unprepared for a world in which the system they oppose proves both durable and adaptable, producing not liberation or collapse but a long, grinding equilibrium that frustrates anti-imperial hopes and exhausts challengers.
(The last, and I mean absolute LAST chance for the US world order to be overturned even PARTIALLY, is for China to defeat the AUKUS in the Taiwan strait prior to 2030-2035 when China’s demographic decline will begin to affect its military strength.)Multipolarism: The Oppositional Defiant DisoPost too long. Click here to view the full text.