The global order is undergoing a quiet yet profound transformation. The liberal international system built post-World War II and rooted in shared rules, open markets, and consolidated under U.S. leadership no longer holds firm. In its place, a colder rationale of power and survival has seen a revival. Realpolitik, the nineteenth‑century creed of Bismarck’s Europe, is once again shaping the world’s future.
Even the appearance of a common “rules-based” order no longer binds major nations. Rather, they are reclaiming their domains of influence, competing openly for strategic supremacy, and using technological control and economic pressure as tools of control. The rivalry and imperial ambition that defined previous periods of world politics are resurfacing in this new environment.
The Changing Face of Power
The change already in progress has accelerated since President Trump returned to the White House. Despite Washington’s current rhetoric of democracy and freedom, its actions frequently betray this. A more imperialistic rather than liberal attitude is shown in transactional diplomacy, economic sanctions, and the use of coercion to control alliances.
China, meanwhile, frames its ascent as a component of a multipolar world based on equality and self-determination. However, its actions, from the proliferation of debt-based infrastructure projects to the gradual escalation of military presence, reflect the same pattern of strategic struggle. The result is a world not moving toward shared cooperation but deeper rivalry, where multipolarity looks more like a contest for hierarchy than a partnership of equals.
This shift is precisely outlined in 2025Chatham House research titled Competing Visions of International Order, which states that each major power—the United States, China, and Russia—now promotes its own model of global order. Despite divergent viewpoints, there is a tacit agreement that privilege is determined by strength. According to China, people with “greater capabilities” should have more influence in the world. Russia looks for domains of influence that are recognizable, like the imperial 19th century. The American call to “Make America Great Again” also expresses a desire for an era of unchallenged authority.
Realpolitik Reborn
The practical philosophy of Bismarck’s Europe, known as Realpolitik, has been revived, and it remains a politics of calculation, one that prizes national interest and advantage over principle or moral restraint. In the twenty-first century, this philosophy has simply learned to wear modern clothes. Expansion and intervention are justified as matters of “strategic necessity.”
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is not treated as an exception but as a signal of a new age. The same reasoning applies to China’s increasingly forceful activities in the South China Sea, Turkey’s repeated incursions into Syria, and India’s regional assertiveness: power is the yardstick of right, and survival is the most important factor.
The penetration of modern realpolitik into the fields of finance and technology is what distinguishes it, and power now takes the form of dependency rather than colonial possession. Control now flows through systems of debt, data, supply chains, and digital networks. Thus, the structure of the empire continues, only under new management. The Spanish Ministry of Defense summarized this moment in its 2025 report, Twenty-First Century: The Return of Empires? It observes that the war in Ukraine “inaugurated a new imperial era on a global scale, a world where borders no longer serve as the clear boundaries of sovereignty.” In other words, the map may look the same, but the logic shaping it has changed.
Empire Without Colonies
The new imperial logic rarely arrives with armies or flags; rather, it operates in silence, influencing the world in a way that seems subtle yet persistent. The United States extends its reach through networks of security alliances and financial control. It controls the world’s currency flow, the dollar’s power, SWIFT’s infrastructure, and the ability to impose sanctions.
Similarly, through vital ports, economic routes, and technological superiority, China expands its sphere of influence both on land and at sea through its Belt and Road Initiative, creating new Silk Roads. Reduced in riches but not in ambition, Russia uses its military might and energy reserves to remind its neighbors of its existence.
Each of these powers constructs what might be called a ‘sphere of strategic dependency.’ Smaller nations orbit them not out of loyalty but because survival demands it. Security, credit, and energy are the currencies of alignment in our age. Therefore, dependence replaces allegiance; necessity substitutes for trust.
As noted in Imperialism’s Revival Strategy (MR Online, March 2025), the mechanisms of this modern imperialism are not always visible in the news cycle, as they function by binding without seeming to conquer through levels of dependency through:
● Economic coercion: Sanctions, debt, or trade restrictions that force countries into unfair partnerships
● Military projection: Permanent bases, armed guarantees, and cross-continental proxy wars
● Ideological legitimacy: Whether it’s the Western “rules-based system” or China’s need for “national rejuvenation,” the validity of ideology is cloaked in the language of culture and order.
These patterns are not exclusive to the East or West; they are shared instincts of an age built on realpolitik. Even rebellion carries traces of empire, and movements that speak of “multipolar unity” often conceal new imbalances. African nations rely on Chinese credit for infrastructure, Central Asian states drift within Moscow’s orbit, and Latin America weighs its options between Washington’s influence and Beijing’s promises. Every empire claims to offer freedom, yet each binds others in turn. The language may change, but the structure remains the same. In truth, the idea of empire never disappeared; it merely learned to operate without colonies.
Multipolarity or Imperial Competition?
In much of the global South, the word “multipolarity” carries a note of hope and suggests balance after a century of Western dominance, a chance for nations long on the margins to find new space for their own paths. Yet the reality emerging before our eyes seems less a story of liberation and more one of rearranged control, where power is redistributed rather than transformed.
A study published in 2025 by Friends of Socialist China, A Multipolar World or a New Cold War?, warns that the celebrated rise of BRICS may not represent a clean break from the old order. Instead, it argues that this so‑called multipolar world still revolves around the same engines of extraction and dependency that sustained earlier empires. Capital continues to flow outward; commodities and concessions still move inward. Therefore, labels may have changed, but the structure of hierarchy remains.
The same logic runs through Monthly Review’s essay The New Geopolitics of Empire, which observes that today’s great powers, East and West alike, justify expansion through narratives of civilization, security, and stability, thus echoing the moral language of the nineteenth‑century empire. In that sense, multipolarity risks becoming less a shared table and more a crowded battlefield, where several imperialisms jostle for position under new banners. Hence, what passes for balance may, in truth, be the coexistence of rival hierarchies. Although each power constructs systems of influence in its own image, they all assert that they are resistant to dominance. So what we see is that instead of emancipation, the outcome is a world where freedom is promised to everyone but only provided to a chosen few, creating an overlapping grid of dependency.
If there was ever hope that multipolarity would result in true equality between countries, it is vanishing in favor of something more recognizable: a struggle for supremacy disguised in diverse jargon.
The Decline of the Westphalian Ideal
The elegant notion that states are equal under the sovereignty of their borders served as the foundation for the modern world for almost five centuries. A delicate balance based on acknowledgment rather than dominance, this Westphalian worldview promised order via respect for one another. Yet that old balance is giving way from within, and today, realpolitik thrives where equality falters. In place of restraint, an imperial pragmatism is taking root, one in which sovereignty has become relative to power. The stronger a state’s reach, the more elastic its borders and its sense of right.
A report by Spain’s Ministry of Defense in 2025 captured this moment starkly. It described the war in Ukraine as the symbolic end of the Westphalian order, ushering in “a world where borders no longer constitute this reference point.” The evidence of that end lies not only in Eastern Europe but across the map: in the quiet persistence of American drone strikes unbounded by war declarations, in China’s fortification of disputed seas, in Israel’s regional interventions, and in Turkey’s recurring presence beyond its frontiers. Everywhere, the same pattern emerges: security invoked as license, expansion disguised as necessity, and reach is now the norm rather than restraint.
The Structure of the New Imperialism
Today’s imperial order operates less through conquest than through integration, less by marching armies than by overlapping systems of control, and its architecture rests on three intertwined foundations: economy, force, and belief.
Economic coercion turns financial instruments into tools of dominance. The dollar, trade networks, and debt become weapons as decisive as any missile. The US holds the monetary high ground; China builds pathways of dependence through loans and infrastructure (through its debt-trap diplomacy); and Europe wields export controls that shape the politics of entire regions. Therefore, gunboat diplomacy has evolved into sanctions diplomacy: the instruments differ, but the outcomes echo the past. (Financial Action Task Force, 2025)
Military projection gives form to political intent wherein power is rendered visible through the permanence of bases, alliances, and the soft-spoken language of “security guarantees.” From Washington’s encirclement of the Pacific to China’s fortification of the South China Sea and Russia’s proxy wars in Africa, these gestures declare a global logic: whoever sustains presence commands space.
Ideological legitimacy binds the structure together; every empire, old or new, needs its myth. The United States speaks of defending a rules-based order, though its rules often serve its interests. China offers “harmonious development,” while Russia invokes the unity of Orthodox civilization. Each discourse presents domination as a duty and hegemony and control as care.
All these pillars reinforce one another; without a moral vocabulary, coercion feels crude; without force, finance lacks direction; without profit, ideology rings hollow. They work in unison to create an empire that no longer needs colonies to function.
The Realpolitik Question: Can the System Hold?
As liberal idealism gives way to pragmatic power, a paradox emerges. States now share one unwritten rule: power precedes law, and interest outruns principle. But rather than stabilizing the system, this symmetry fuels volatility. During the Cold War, bipolarity imposed discipline: a balance maintained through fear. Today’s multipolar world is fluid: lines blur, and ambitions collide. The International Crisis Group’s ongoing Ukraine analysis calls that war a “crucible of overlapping empires,” where both Russian revisionism and NATO expansion claim security as justification.
The next pressure points are already visible: Taiwan’s skies, the frozen Baltic frontier, the Caucasus mountains, and Central Asia’s alliances. Each is a frontier of empire more than nationhood. Thus, the future will hinge not on consensus but on fatigue and whether rival imperialisms can coexist without destruction.
Toward an Imperial Realpolitik
The collapse of liberal idealism has not brought about balance, only a colder kind of order built on competing ambitions. What we are witnessing is not the disappearance of the empire, but its transformation, and the pursuit of power has shed its polite disguises. It no longer hides behind the rhetoric of moral obligation or universal principles; rather, it now makes a clear case for itself by claiming necessity and survival.
Realpolitik, once a doctrine of pragmatic calculation, has evolved into something broader and far more pervasive. It is no longer just a method of statecraft; it has become the language through which power explains itself to the world. Everywhere, nations speak of realism and practice domination, and each state justifies its expansionist ideology and coercive reach as the correct order and defense.
The question that remains for our century is not whether empires have returned; in actuality, they never truly left. The real question is whether humanity can live beneath the shadow of several empires at once, each claiming righteousness, each armed with instruments of annihilation, and each convinced of its own civilizational duty to prevail.
If the twentieth century was shaped by the confrontation between two great powers and their competing dreams, the twenty-first may be defined by the uneasy coexistence of many powers and no dreams at all. Thus, it is pertinent to note that even in this hardened climate, the task of preserving a measure of dignity, and perhaps a fragment of peace, still belongs to us. Therefore, the durability of this order will not be determined by abstract theory or diplomatic agreements, but by the decisions states make when existential pressures test their moral restraint. In those moments, the ethical character of our century will be forged.
