United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres, in his speech at the High-Level Segment of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2024, attempted to characterize today’s world as one in which the quest for multipolarity has triggered a “purgatory of polarity”, in which impunity would reign and the rules and protection mechanisms established in international law would not be respected. For, “in that purgatory, more and more countries are filling the spaces of geopolitical divisions and doing whatever they want without any accountability”.
This narrative creates the misleading perception that it is multipolarity that is responsible for the world being plunged into chaos, due to the deliberate failure of the powers of collective imperialism to comply with the rules established by the United Nations Charter. It is as if the emerging powers, or those peoples of the world who see multipolarity as an opportunity to exist, were responsible for the imperialist powers’ indiscriminate violence, genocide, expansionism, and the dismantling of the international security architecture that has brought the world to the brink of nuclear conflict.
The Main Threat To US Imperialism
In his reflections on deterrence in international security, retired US General Michael P. C. Carns argued that the main threat and greatest challenge facing the United States today is the existence of a multipolar world in which hundreds of actors with different types and levels of power, within the framework of a set of cross-cutting alliances, make the world more “dangerous and volatile” than in previous contexts of bipolarity.
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The geopolitical battle is in full swing, and whoever controls the narrative will be able to direct the consolidation of a new multipolar world order, because in this world of exponential subjectivities, it is not enough to “be good”; one also has to appear to be so, and one must have the cultural and communicational strength so that the peoples of the world can be aware of this geopolitical battle for the defense of a new international power correlation and the democratization of the decision-making process, projecting the interests and cultural values of the diversity represented by the Global South.