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Congratulations. The multipolar world you ordered is here. And now we all get to suffer the consequences. For several years now, there's been much talk about the end of the post war order and the coming of a multipolar world. The desirability of this wonderful new arrangement has been pushed by three groups. Naive woke leftists, similarly naive isolationists, and of course, and above all our enemies. Each had their reasons. Western progressives view the world through a simple, warped but powerful lens. Their approach to global politics is exactly the same as their view of domestic politics and is based on the appealing but misguided idea that success is always and everywhere the product of unearned ill gotten privilege. Their antipathy towards the west, white people, men, Jews and the rich stems from this basic formula. Whoever is doing well must be doing so at the expense of others. To them, any imbalance in wealth, income, influence, and so forth is necessarily bad and to be corrected at the domestic level. The culmination of this worldview is their demand for social justice, a forced redistribution of wealth, influence, and opportunity from the oppressors to the oppressed. You don't need to be a Robin Diangelo acolyte to see how this Marxist dynamic extends to global affairs. Social justice at home becomes global justice abroad. If the world is unequal, which it is, then that must be corrected. Their extraordinary ignorance of the world beyond the borders of the safe, peaceful and civilized countries they live in is extremely helpful in this regard because it prevents them from seeing that peace, stability and prosperity are are the products of culture, science, and innovation. Instead, they argue that the West's recent dominance is a product of colonialism, racism, and imperialism. They hate the west for being successful and want a multipolar world as both a punishment and a corrective. The isolationists, on the other hand, are primarily an American phenomenon, albeit one which has spread to other parts of the west along with every other aspect of American culture. I have some sympathy for their instincts, even though they are, in my view, as misguided as the woke left about the way the world actually works. Having traveled extensively around America, I well understand the feeling of a man living a comfortable life in rural Ohio being asked to care about events happening halfway around the world. When I sit on the porch of my Airbnb somewhere in the middle of America, I find it much harder to care about those events too. For this reason, among others, isolationism has always existed in American history and was particularly powerful in the 1930s. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, the president who orchestrated America's support for Britain during World War II and his country's eventual full involvement in that conflict, had to tread extremely carefully around his faction until Pearl Harbor. The outcome of that war, an overwhelming moral and military victory over indisputable evil, kept isolationists quiet for some time. But the horrors of Vietnam, compounded by the trillion dollar disasters of Afghanistan and Iraq, have understandably produced a powerful backlash against interventionism. America can't be the world's policeman, went the cry. Unfortunately, simple slogans are rarely true and inevitably leave out much needed context. America accounts for 5% of the world's population but 25% of its GDP. Much of this is due to geography, natural resource wealth, and the ingenuity and drive of her people. But much of it also stems from the fact that America is the world's most powerful country, an advantage she uses with great skill. To get the best deals, secure access to resources, and shape global affairs in a way that benefits her and her allies. To pretend that Americans can continue to enjoy unprecedented prosperity, security and peace as their country completely withdraws from global affairs is to misunderstand the way the world works. There's a strange irony here. The two groups that have most celebrated the coming multipolar world are now also the ones complaining the most about its consequences. And that is because, despite their good intentions, woke leftists and neo isolationists have served as useful idiots to the people who are actually driving the multipolarity narrative. Hostile foreign powers that feel it is their moment to end American hegemony. China's economic growth and Russia's recovery from the collapse of the USSR occurred at precisely the same time as the collapse of the West's moral, economic and military authority. The shifting balance of power naturally produced a hunger for a different arrangement. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, the terrorist attack of October 7, and China's increasingly open coveting of Taiwan are all signs of a deeper geopolitical realignment. For the moment, the demographic and economic tide has swung powerfully against the West. Our enemies are emboldened by their growing strength, encouraged by our weakness, and no longer constrained by international law, which was only ever worth the paper it was written on. While the US was willing to act as the world's policeman, Europe and Britain especially, are particularly responsible for the sorry state of affairs. We've degraded our militaries to the point where, despite our technological and scientific superiority, the courage of our soldiers, sailors and airmen, and the rich military tradition Britain in particular can be so proud of, we are not a useful ally to the United States anymore. The condition of our armed forces is matched only by the degradation of our culture and the economic suicide we've committed over the last two decades. Decades? Unprecedented, unwanted and unassimilable levels of mass immigration have brought in millions of people who would never fight for our country, while at the same time creating an environment in which native young people understandably have little desire to fight. For politicians who've betrayed the future they were owed. Nowhere is this more true than the economy. Unaffordable welfare spending has been paired with the purposeful destruction of our manufacturing and industrial base. Our deluded attempt to save the planet has rightly been called net zero because it has produced zero growth for two decades. Britain's GDP per capita is lower today than it was 20 years ago. Germany, meanwhile, famously shut down its nuclear power plants for ideological reasons, making itself entirely reliant on Russian energy the result? When Putin invaded Ukraine, Germany's initial response was to send a few helmets. Europe has been living in a dream world, and the rude awakening is here. So where does that leave us? What will this beautiful multipolar world look like? The easiest way to understand the geopolitics of the next decade is to look at Mexico. For two decades now, that country has been a war zone with dozens of drug cartels fighting for territory, influence and resources. What happens when one is weakened or decapitated? The same thing that always happens when there's a power vacuum, a power struggle. As I tried to explain to Yanis Varoufakis in this debate, a multipolar world is by definition a more unstable, violent world. This is why it's highly regrettable that we've arrived here. It's also why President Trump is doing the only thing he can, under the circumstances, the best thing he can for his cartel. 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