/leftypol/ - Leftist Politically Incorrect

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 Disorder (ODD) of politics

I want to distinguish here between multipolar-ism and multipolarity itself. Multipolarity is simply a word describing a geopolitical state: it means multiple great powers with independent strategic freedom, each able to shape outcomes, set norms, and escalate or de-escalate on their own terms; instability exists, but no single actor can reliably cap it, and regional wars can more easily spill or realign the system itself. Power is horizontally distributed and outcomes are genuinely contingent. Sometimes the West loses, sometimes it wins, sometimes rules change.

What is instead happening is not multipolarity. It is instead a still largely unipolar managed instability. Conflicts persist, but within boundaries that one side largely enforces. Rivals can resist, harass, endure, and survive, but they cannot decisively rewrite the system or win clean strategic victories. Escalation is asymmetric: non-Western actors pay exponentially higher costs for breaking ceilings than Western actors do. Wars freeze not because of balance, but because one pole has the ability to punish attempts at resolution it doesn’t like while avoiding full commitment itself.
“Multipolarism”, OTOH, is essentially the Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) of politics: a posture defined less by a positive program than by reflexive negation. The core impulse isn’t “what would materially improve people’s lives?” but “whatever the West says or does, I must oppose it,” even if the alternative is incoherent, reactionary, or demonstrably worse by the very standards the speaker once claimed to hold.
Multipolarism as Resentment
Given that why do people continue to hold onto these theories? Its because once politics collapses into that mode, losing doesn’t matter anymore. In fact, loss can even be perversely comforting, because it preserves the oppositional identity. Winning would require responsibility, governance, tradeoffs, and worst of all accountability to real people rather than symbolic enemies. That’s why you see the same figures cycling from one “anti-Western” fantasy to the next, mythologizing Safavids, Assad, Hamas, Russia, Iran, whoever, regardless of ideology or class structure, and then rationalizing failure as moral purity when those forces predictably get crushed or constrained.
Multipolarism never should have been taken seriously, the fact that it is so popular is indicative of a moral and analytical collapse that’s been brewing for years. A lot of people who once talked seriously about socialism, labor power, material conditions, and workers’ control quietly abandoned those commitments and replaced them with a shallow, aestheticized anti-Westernism that treats any force opposing the U.S. or Israel as automatically emancipatory. In doing so, they stopped asking basic questions about class power, state capacity, coercion, or outcomes, and instead started romanticizing reactionary states, sectarian militias, and long-dead empires as if symbolism itself were a substitute for material victory or social transformation.
The result is that they lose on every axis. They lose militarily, because the actors they cheer are structurally weaker, corrupt, and strategically constrained. They lose politically, because their “anti-imperialism” produces nothing resembling workers’ control, egalitarianism, or mass emancipation, just repression with different flags. And they lose morally, because cheering for the suffering of civilians, or excusing authoritarianism and theocracy, hollows out any claim to universal justice. What’s left is resentment politics: identity without power, aesthetics without strategy, and denunciation without a path to winning anything that would actually improve ordinary people’s lives.
Resentment politics is why this strain of anti-Westernism feels so hollow and repetitive. It isn’t animated by a concrete socialist program, class power, or material strategy; it’s animated by hatred of those who can act, organize, project force, and shape outcomes. The romanticization of defeated empires, reactionary states, or militias isn’t about their values or successes, it’s about using them as symbolic weapons against the West’s confidence and competence. Even loss can be metabolized as “moral victory,” because resentment prefers inverted values over actual change. Resentment eventually consumes its host: it produces a politics that cannot create, cannot govern, and cannot win, only negate.
TLDR: You multipolaristas all sold your souls and in exchange got NOTHING. You traded the universal project of socialism for vibe-based anti-Westernism, and still can’t even point to a strategic win, then what you’ve really abandoned isn’t the West, it’s the idea that politics should be about building durable, emancipatory power at all.