Are We Still Counting Tanks? Ten Theses on Why Polarity Cannot Explain the World

In the public debate on the war in the Middle East, it has become almost commonplace to adopt certain analytical complacency that reduces the complexity of the global scenario to a single organizing metaphor. From this perspective, contemporary wars are often interpreted as if the international system were a RISK game where Donald Trump or a few others move all the pieces. The underlying premise, either explicit or tacit, is always the same: the world is polarized.

Polarity thus functions as a cartographic metaphor for global power. It reduces the complexity of the international system to a handful of great powers—commonly referred to as 'poles'—and assesses their magnitude in terms of material capabilities such as population, economy, military expenditure, and technology. Three canonical models emerge from this reduction: 1) the unipolarity of the post-Cold War era, where the United States had no obvious rival; 2) the bipolarity of the Cold War, with a symmetrical duel between Washington and Moscow that divided the world in two; and 3) multipolarity, as a more dispersed setting of different rivaling centers, which some see as re-emerging today. Three models with one underlying assumption: global history is written by one, two or a few powerful states—without any precise threshold to define them—while everything else is relegated to subplot or background noise.

It is noteworthy that this metaphor does not originate from a specific school of thought or ideology. Although it is often associated with realism in international relations theory, polarity is equally embraced by its critics. Those supporting bipolarity interpret every conflict as a new Cold War between Washington and Beijing, while those supporting multipolarity celebrate the rise of BRICS as if it were, in itself, an emancipatory promise. Beyond this dispute, both share the same lens: polarity as a common grammar, or the only game in town, to paraphrase Juan Linz.

What this trans-ideological consensus reveals is something deeper than a theoretical choice. In Latin America, the same political analyst can resort to polarity to interpret a certain conflict and abandon it in another analysis without even explaining such inconsistency. A similar situation occurs at the state level: China, Russia, Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, the European Union, and Turkey—actors with very different agendas—all agree in advocating multipolarity in their official documents. In these contexts, polarity does not describe the system but rather competes for position in global debates.

Why does a contested conceptual tool continue to dominate international analysis? What interests—academic, media, political—does it serve? What follows are ten uncomfortable theses. Not to discard cartography altogether, but as starting points to open the discussion on how we explain the world.

1. Importing a Physical Metaphor Does Not Warrant a Complete Interpretation

Polarity was not originally coined as a category in International Relations; rather, it migrated from Newtonian physics to 17th-century European diplomacy, in which states were regarded as poles with mass that attract or repel one another, power was measured as quantifiable magnitude, and equilibrium was considered the natural condition toward which the system tends. Although the first conceptual formulations come from Harold Lasswell (1948) and Morton Kaplan (1957), it was Kenneth Waltz who made the most influential application in Theory of International Politics (1979). Inspired by neoclassical microeconomics, Waltz categorized the international structure as unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar according to the distribution of state capabilities, just as a market can be monopolistic, duopolistic, or oligopolistic according to the distribution of shares. It is striking that those who employ the concept today rarely know its origin or the purpose for which it was created. Polarity circulates as analytical common sense, stripped of its genealogy.

Waltz categorized the international structure as unipolar, bipolar, or multipolar according to the distribution of state capabilities.

Genealogy precisely reveals the concept's claim to authority. As De Keersmaeker (2017) points out, the notion of polarity draws on the discourses of highly prestigious sciences, giving it an apparent rigor that is difficult to question. However, this positivist heritage also reveals its limits: by importing categories from the natural sciences, it disguises metaphor as evidence and turns a partial interpretation into a totalizing reading. What is accidental—material capabilities and their distribution—becomes entrenched as an almost permanent structure. The concentration of power in a few actors (agency) is ultimately portrayed as equivalent to the international system as a whole (structure).

2. Power Does Not Concentrate: It Tends to Diffuse and Be Contested

The notion of poles assumes that power tends to accumulate in a few states with the capacity to set the limits of what is possible. But what we observe in the 21st century is the opposite movement: a growing dispersion of capabilities among an ever-growing number of actors that erodes the Westphalian hierarchy of sovereign units. In The Future of Power (2011), Joseph Nye distinguished two simultaneous dynamics: a transition of power from West to East, and a diffusion that diminishes the leading role of the state in relation to other non-State actors. The second, he argued, is more disruptive than the first.

Five vectors explain this diffusion. The technological revolution drastically reduced entry costs: NGOs, armed groups, and social movements today exert global influence with minimal resources. Financial globalization has allowed transnational markets to discipline states more effectively than any rival power. Non-state actors such as multinational corporations, criminal groups, or digital platforms occupy governance domains previously reserved for governments. The rise of emerging powers reshaped the geography of global GDP after the 2008 crisis. Moreover, transnational private actors such as large tech corporations, credit rating agencies, and investment funds gather structural power of the first order over finance and technology (Nye, 2011).

The contemporary system is defined not by the concentration of power, but by its perpetually contested character.

Regarding the military sphere, diffusion is equally irreversible. Michael Horowitz, in The Diffusion of Military Power (2010), showed how military innovations are redistributed throughout the system. The roles of air power can now be exercised with a laptop, a drone, and some imagination. As non-state actors, the Houthis1 can disrupt global supply chains, affect maritime insurance premiums, and reshape the calculations of nuclear powers. And the diffusion of power does not guarantee order either; as Susan Strange warned, it leaves a black hole of un-governance. The contemporary system is therefore defined not by the concentration of power, but by its perpetually contested character.

3. Nodes Are More Important Than Poles

Around 20 percent of the world's oil trade and 30 percent of global liquefied natural gas trade go through the Strait of Hormuz. Far from being a 'pole', Iran exerts disproportionate power because it occupies a nodal point that simultaneously affects multiple actors. In a world of fragmented or reconfigured globalization, it is more important where one is located within a network than how much power one accumulates. Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman (2019) show how some actors can 'weaponize' interdependence by exploiting central positions in critical infrastructures, monetary and financial systems, or strategic routes.

Polarity conceives power as the accumulation of resources in terms of stocks, but this perspective fails to capture the dynamics of flows, networks, global supply chains, and critical infrastructures. The logic of nodes explains these dynamics more precisely: a node does not dominate because of what it possesses, but because of its position and its capacity to condition the flows within the system. In States and Markets (1988), Susan Strange introduced the concept of structural power, defining it as the ability to shape the structures within which other actors operate—security (provision of protection and alliances), production (control of value chains), finance (monetary and credit systems), and knowledge (ideas, technology, and information). Kitchen and Cox (2019) also argue that whoever defines the structure decisively conditions its internal relations. Polarity measures who possesses more, yet fails to see who defines what counts as having more.

Polarity measures who possesses more, yet fails to see who defines what counts as having more.

US financial hegemony rests on three pillars: the dollar accounts for around 56 percent of global trade, even though the United States represents barely ten percent of it; central banks hold approximately 58 percent of their reserves in dollars; and US markets concentrate nearly 40 percent of global bond and stock assets. Such dominance is built on a material circuit linking petrodollars with military presence in the Gulf, established by the Kissinger-Saudi Arabia agreement of 1974. The Strait of Hormuz crisis reveals the fragility of this system. By blocking flows and promoting yuan-denominated transactions settled through CIPS rather than SWIFT, Iran is not merely challenging a strategic route, but also constraining the financial circuit that depends on it, thereby weakening the mechanism that has sustained US hegemony for decades.

4. The State Is Not a Pole: Transnational Elites Contend for Power

The concept of pole assumes a state that functions as a coherent unit with definable and stable national interests. Yet this image ignores a structural phenomenon of contemporary capitalism, in which transnational elites operate above and through states, capturing their agency and reshaping the boundaries of state autonomy. As the neo-Gramscian tradition points out (Cox, 1981; van der Pijl, 1998), understanding world politics requires tracing how transnational elites build hegemony not only through coercion, but also through the production of consensus and the co-optation of institutions. There is no homogeneous transnational elite, but multiple, pursuing partially divergent interests through distinct power strategies.

Disciplinary mechanisms over states are now primarily private. Credit rating agencies such as Moody's, S&P, and Fitch are powerful enough to trigger fiscal crises in states that fail to meet the conditions of financial capital. BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street together are the largest shareholders in 88 percent of the top 500 US companies: they require no explicit coordination because their structural incentives produce it automatically (Fichtner et al., 2017). Energy and philanthropic elites complete the picture: they exert power not only over markets but over knowledge, public agendas, and global health, climate, and education policies. And military-industrial elites are currently producing a privatized military revolution through Palantir and Anduril, rendering the line between state capacity and private capital ever more blurred.

Alongside these groups, ideological elites have emerged with the same transnational level of organization, though anti-globalist in their rhetoric. Applebaum (2020) documented how Steve Bannon built a network of far-right parties—including Lega Nord, VOX, AfD, Fidesz, Bolsonaro, and Trump—on the basis of shared funding and explicit ideological coordination. This Reactionary International operates in Latin America through a funded network of think tanks (Malacalza and Tokatlian, 2023). And alongside them, the techno-libertarians also play a role: Peter Thiel has openly argued that freedom and democracy are no longer compatible, while Elon Musk has merged strategic assets with direct political influence over the Trump administration.

The Westphalian order is being weakened not only from below by sub-state actors, but also from above by elites that no longer require the state as their primary instrument of power.

These dynamics reflect what Goddard and Newman (2025) label neo-royalism: an emerging order in which basic units are no longer the Westphalian states but networks of personal loyalty to informal sovereigns who hierarchically concentrate power, crossing borders and fragmenting territories. The Westphalian order is being weakened not only from below by sub-state actors, but also from above by elites that no longer require the state as their primary instrument of power.

5. More Capabilities Do Not Translate Into More Effective Power

One of the most silent and damaging assumptions of polarity is that power is fungible, meaning that capabilities accumulated in one domain are transferable to another. The polarity index only makes sense under this fungible quality, as adding capabilities from heterogeneous domains into a single figure is only logical if such capabilities are interchangeable. But they are not.

In Power and Interdependence (1977), Keohane and Nye demonstrated that, under conditions of complex interdependence, power is related to a specific field and is not automatically transferred from one domain to another. The fact that the United States was unable to prevail in Vietnam, despite its overwhelming military superiority, disrupted realist assumptions. The OPEC oil embargo of 1973 confirmed this from another angle: militarily weak states could exert significant influence over the global economy. This diagnosis, made half a century ago, remains more valid today than ever.

The blockade of the Strait of Hormuz has recently reinforced this point. The military superiority of the United States in the Gulf is unquestionable, but it does not solve the problems of the blockade: aircraft carriers do not replace oil tanker routes, financial sanctions do not stop nuclear proliferation, US dollar hegemony does not neutralize trade in yuan, and a ceasefire cannot force insurers to lower risk premiums for shipping companies. By aggregating everything into a single index, polarity creates a distorted image of effective power.

6. Algorithmic Power Is Structural, Opaque, and Irreducible to Capabilities

There is a form of power that cannot be measured or accumulated as stock. Algorithmic power—the capacity to direct behavior, reorganize markets, and redefine conflicts through data and automation—displays a distinct nature. It is neither military nor economic in the conventional sense. It is structural, following Strange's contributions, and operates simultaneously in three dimensions: cognitive (shaping perceptions), geoeconomic (concentrating wealth and reordering markets), and geopolitical (creating hierarchies and technological dependencies). It produces effects before actions are taken and remains invisible on any map of polarity.

Digital infrastructure has become a military target, and physical and algorithmic warfare have merged for the first time in history.

Leading platforms employ business models based on massive extraction of behavioral data and its conversion into tools for shaping human conduct on a global scale. The race for AI intensifies this dynamic, as even Washington and Beijing depend on private actors—OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic—to sustain their military and economic competitiveness. On the horizon, quantum computing deepens this rupture: its potential to break encryption systems is reshaping global security, granting whoever leads this capability an advantage comparable to the US nuclear monopoly of 1945, yet impossible to represent in terms of polarity.

The war in the Middle East encapsulates these trends, marking the first time that AI data centers have been explicitly targeted as physical objectives: at least two in United Arab Emirates and one in Bahrain were attacked. Digital infrastructure has thus become a military target, and physical and algorithmic warfare have merged for the first time in history.

7. Polarity Does Not Explain Global Wars

We are living global wars not because warfare occurs on every continent, but because such conflicts generate systemic effects. They engage great powers, corporations, and transnational elites directly or indirectly, and their economic impacts spread on a global scale. In this context, the postwar order is fracturing—arms control regimes (including nuclear weapons) are weakening, the financial system is fragmenting, international law norms are eroding—while the taboos on the use of force is also collapsing. The result is an interregnum: a period of reorganization and unstable thresholds, in which a new order has not yet been fully defined—or may already be emerging without our being able to fully recognize it.

We are living global wars because such conflicts generate systemic effects.

The literature identifies four thresholds that reveal the shift from regional conflict to global war. The first is nuclear escalation: Schelling (1966) describes it as 'a signalling process' in which each step displays a tendency to go further. It is largely irreversible, as every action taken reinforces a logic of war with real consequences. The second is the fragmentation of financial order. The 20th-century world wars were preceded by breakdowns of the monetary system, and the current partial dedollarization can be both a symptom and a driver of systemic conflict. The third is the breakdown of multilateral trade. The Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 anticipated the Second World War, and the partial decoupling between the United States and China today reduces interdependence. The fourth is the loss of institutional legitimacy. The League of Nations collapsed when the powers ceased to recognize it, and the question today is whether the UN system—with its Security Council paralyzed and arms control regimes weakened—is undergoing a similar process.

Ukraine and Iran have not fully crossed these thresholds, but they are eroding them simultaneously. They are not isolated conflicts, but nodes of the same systemic disturbance that accumulates irreversible effects without yet displaying a new order. Polarity, which presumes stability and balance, proves insufficient for analyzing this interregnum.

8. There Are No Ordering Poles, but a Conflict of Visions to Define the World

From the polarity perspective, international order is disciplined by great powers that set the limits of action in the system. According to Morgenthau (1948), order derives from power having the capacity to impose its own will. Kissinger (2015) adds that only the great powers define what is permissible. Gilpin (1981) argues that order rewards behavior aligned with the interests of the most powerful. This establishes a hierarchical ontology that portrays inequality of power as an almost natural structural condition.

The central question of international order is normative: what order is desirable, legitimate, and possible? 

Such assumption is inadequate. The world is not organized into poles seeking balance, but rather into constellations in dispute—elites, centers of articulation, networks of interdependence, and actors with different forms of power interacting simultaneously across multiple levels. The central question of international order is no longer descriptive but normative: what order is desirable, legitimate, and possible? Following Katzenstein (2022) suggests, what emerges is a conflict of worldviews that not only describe reality but also delimit what is thinkable and possible. The result is a post-Western, non-polar, polynodal, polycentric, and multi-layered world. As Hirst et al. (2024) argue, there are no poles imposing order, only a plurality of visions competing to do so.

9. The International System Has Limits That No Pole Controls

The notion of polarity omits a crucial fact: there are thresholds beyond state power that condition, limit, and reconfigure any exercise of power, regardless of the will or capabilities of the poles. The planetary threshold (biosphere)—climate change, water stress, biodiversity loss—functions as a systemic constraint that reorganizes economic flows, migration patterns, and security conditions independently of strategic decisions (Merke, 2025). The technological threshold (technosphere) continually displaces the boundaries of what is possible: innovations such as artificial intelligence or quantum computing create asymmetries and dependencies that are not distributed according to the logic of polarity, because power is seized by those who remain at these shifting edges of innovation. The social threshold (sociosphere) sets normative and political limits on the exercise of power, since no order is founded solely on coercion. When global citizenship pushes against this threshold, even the most powerful nations find their capacity for action restricted. These thresholds operate as external borders that states do not fully control, and which polarity—focused narrowly on state capabilities—simply cannot account for.

10. Polarity Is Not Evidence, but a Device of Alignment

The metaphor of polarity originates in a conceptual translation from physical sciences to International Relations that is neither innocent nor merely descriptive. When a worldview becomes dominant in contexts where strategic knowledge is produced—such as elites, think tanks, foreign ministries, graduate programs, and specialized media—it ceases to be an analytical tool and becomes a device for producing reality. The narrative of polarity does not describe an existing international system; it contributes to producing it, naturalizing it, and presenting other possible configurations as unthinkable or irresponsible.

In practice, this narrative operates as a performative declaration: by stating that the system is bipolar or multipolar—and still counting poles—it both describes and prescribes what is possible. It delimits the relevant actor and the legitimate question (which pole to align with). Following Cox (1981), every theory is always useful for someone and for some purpose.

The magnet metaphor reinforces a logic of attraction and grouping, suggesting that actors are inevitably drawn toward one pole, as if alignment were an objective law. References to unipolarity or bipolarity implicitly mean alignment with Washington. Speaking of multipolarity implies alignment with China, presented as a new dominant and unstoppable power. Polarity is therefore not descriptive, but prescriptive: it not only explains the world, it dictates how actors should behave.

This structure sustains a dichotomous confrontation and fuels narratives of a 'new Cold War', promoted by the United States to frame China as a systemic rival. In this context, the metaphor does not merely describe confrontation; it contributes to producing it. Autonomy, equidistance, or hedging (the possibility of organizing positions not derived from poles) are devalued as unviable exceptions. Those who do not align are portrayed as irrelevant or devoid of agency.

Polarity naturalizes power concentration, portrays historical configurations as inevitable, and legitimizes spheres of influence under the guise of scientific terminology.

The effects are clear: polarity naturalizes power concentration, portrays historical configurations as inevitable, and legitimizes spheres of influence under the guise of scientific terminology. Ultimately, polarity functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy. By naming the world as bipolar or multipolar, it encourages behaviors that make it more polarized. If you are not aligned with one pole, you are instead with the other; or you are in a transition that will eventually result in alignment. As the Thomas Theorem in sociology states: "If men define their situations as real, they are real in the consequences."

An Open Discussion

The effects of polarity are especially evident in Latin America. Whenever a government in this region develops a foreign policy that does not aligned with the preferences of Washington or Beijing, polarity narratives activate a grammar of suspicion. On one side, the country is accused of 'getting closer to China', 'opening space for Russia', or 'weakening the hemispheric security architecture.' On the other, it is labelled 'subordinate to Washington,' 'serving imperialism,' betraying the multipolar horizon of the Global South. Autonomy is thus coded as dangerous. And that coding is not spontaneous: it requires the narrative of polarity to be sufficiently naturalized for its categories to operate as evident truths rather than arguments.

Polarity is therefore not harmless. It actually produces strategic common sense, making certain questions appear reasonable, while others seem naive or dangerous. It does not forbid thinking about autonomy, but it delineates the 'red lines' and highlights the cognitive, political, and institutional costs of considering it. Polarity functions as a conceptual trap that operates before any debate even begins, by establishing the terms of discussion, if debate occurs at all. We are not claiming that the narrative of polarity is false. Rather, it is biased, and such bias is useful, as it favors those actors who interpret the world in terms of poles to justify alignments, allocate resources, and present what is, in each case, a choice or self-interest.

What is lost when a region considers its position in the world using categories it did not create? Is foreign policy autonomy possible without its own lens? These uncomfortable theses are not an alternative map. They are an invitation to reflect on whether the map we use allows us to perceive what truly needs to be seen.

This article was first published by the Buenos Aires Office of the Heinrich-Böll-Stiftung. Translated from Spanish into English by Laura Alegre and Sabrina Nieto for Abrapalabra Language Service Co-op.

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