How is multipolarity advancing against the hegemony of the Collective West?

The other day I was a guest at a reception hosted by one of the non-Western embassies in Brussels which was dedicated to advancing Eurasian security and which opened with a professionally prepared film explaining how the Global South was advancing against the Collective West with help from BRICS and from various international conferences that rally together positive-minded intellectuals in the cause of multipolarity. The annual international conference on security convened in Minsk, Belarus in October was held up as an example of this forward movement by progressive humanity.

Self-congratulatory balderdash, I thought, when I stepped out of the reception and took some fresh air. This kind of talk is as devoid of critical thinking as the whole Global Warming campaign of the conformist Center and Left. I do not deny the reality of climate change, but the notion that it is all manmade and can be reversed by discontinuing use of carbon fuels is empty speculation, nothing more.

So it is with the idea that BRICS is overturning Western dominance now that the share of global GDP held by BRICS countries in 44% while that of G7 countries is 28% (approximate numbers). I have heard this nonsense about GDP as the measure of Hard Power going back to a little debate I had with the doyen of the Realist School of international relations, John Mearsheimer, in my house in Brussels together with Steve Cohen and his wife Katrina vanden Heuvel in March 2015.

John said then that Russia was a declining power and just a spoiler: look at its miserable GDP. Then in 2016 during the Russian elections the same point was made by the Liberal party Yabloko who insisted that standing up to the US as the Putin government proposed was impossible. The money being spent on arms was a waste, they said, because Russia just represented 3% of global GDP.

Rubbish. Russia is doing just fine in Hard Power notwithstanding its still being a tiny part of global GDP. John Mearsheimer has, in the meantime, changed his tune ever since Russian command of the field of battle in Ukraine became undeniable about six months ago. He now calls Russia a ‘Great Power.’

Hard Power is determined not only by GDP: other key factors include national will, fighting spirit and readiness for self-sacrifice, as well as the talent and dedication of the boys and girls in the labs and in the military industrial complex.

I say that multipolarity is not being advanced by BRICS, which was smashed by Trump’s secondary tariffs, by the way. See India’s halt to import of Russian petroleum following Trump’s imposition of economically punishing secondary tariffs which more than outweighed the advantages to India of discounted prices on their oil imports. Moreover, the internal contradictions among the BRICS core countries, especially due to Brazil and India not sharing the preoccupations of other members, have compelled the founding members Russia and China to refocus their attention on building out the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which they control indisputably.

Multipolarity is being advanced on the field of battle in Ukraine. The world champion of multipolarity is not China or India, or the collective BRICS, it is Russia.

Finally, it has occurred to me that the death of Western hegemony has been grossly exaggerated time and again. It should have occurred following WWI, when the enormous prosperity of Europe had been dissipated on the battlefields that also wiped out an entire generation of potential national leaders. Then it received what should have been the coup de grâce in WWII, which bankrupted Britain, causing queuing for rationed staples for more than five years afterwards, and which led directly and immediately to the independence of India. Loss of India by itself deprived Britain at a stroke of perhaps 75% of its empire in terms of population and wealth. Further concessions of independence and loss of empire followed for both Britain and France through the 1970s. Did this end the global dominance of the Collective West? Not at all! What occurred was a shift in power and decision-making within the Collective West from the former imperial powers to the United States, while the Collective West in its entirety continued to exploit the Rest of the World economically and otherwise. The exercise of colonial superiority over former African colonies was continued, in the French case, via the CFA franc.

This is not to say that a decisive reordering of power at the global board of governance is not occurring before our eyes. But, I insist, it is happening on the field of battle in Ukraine.

Russia has won the war. The challenge now is to win the peace. And a large task will be to ensure changes in the policies or in personnel at the top in 23 out of 27 European Member States. Their leaders have locked arms and stood together behind a program of inflicting a strategic defeat on Russia by proxy war in Ukraine and to this day they refuse to acknowledge defeat.

Note that I now add Belgium to Hungary, Slovakia and Czechia as a country led by someone independently thinking and accepting realities, as against the conformist and plainly stupid others.

Europe must come around to revising the security architecture on the Continent to bring Russia in from the cold. This is an essential step for the move towards a multipolar world to proceed on track.

©Gilbert Doctorow, 2025