Multipolarity empowers global revisionism - spread of autocratic regimes that have resulted in mass incarceration and genocide.

Recent events, however, should give progressives pause about what a multipolar world means. Certainly, belief that the United States would act unilaterally, unwisely, and unfairly was sustenance to multipolarity’s cheerleaders at home and abroad. “Calling for a ‘multipolar world’ [became] a euphemism for opposing the Iraq war,” Foreign Policy’s Elizabeth Dickinson observed. While President George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq is widely disparaged today both in the United States and international circles today, only the passage of time will—like Harry S. Truman’s intervention in Korea—determine its place in history. However, as China, Russia, Iran, and Turkey challenge the post–World War II international order and seek regional dominance, their behavior reflects the reality of what a multipolar world truly means. What would a multipolar world look like? Consider, for example, China’s abduction of Meng Hongwei, the head of Interpol. Can international and multilateral organizations work if their leaders must subordinate themselves to the increasingly hardline Chinese Communist Party? Russia’s protection of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s use of chemical weapons, meanwhile, signals the end of a post–World War I consensus. Critics can castigate the United States for upwards of two hundred thousand Iraqi deaths, which occurred as the result of the U.S. invasion of Iraq and its aftermath, but they often ignore the fact that America was not to blame for most of these deaths. Instead, they were a result of suicide bombings and other terrorist attacks sponsored by Tehran and others who too often avoid progressive accountability for their choices. Put another way, American training and tactics seek to minimize civilian casualties in all phases of conflict. Russia, however, has no such qualms: ask the Chechens. Nor should America’s history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provide an excuse to ignore those, like China, who today would incarcerate a million citizens in re-education camps solely because of their ethnicity or religion. Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan has been forthright in his desire to reshape the post–World War II international order. “Rather than justice, the existing global order is producing chaos, injustice and despair,” he argued in September 2018. But it is Erdoğan who has waged ethnic cleansing against Syrian Kurds, a campaign he may soon expand, and Erdoğan defended genocide in the Sudan and opened the floodgates for foreign fighters into the Islamic State. It’s one thing to criticize or second-guess U.S. policy; that is the domain of democratic debate in Congress and during presidential campaigns and in dueling op-eds in a free press, but it is nonsensical to suggest that any alternate pole—Moscow, Beijing, Tehran, or Ankara—would make the world a more peaceful place or better respect the evolving international human-rights regime. The one thing revisionist states have in common is that they tolerate neither debate nor dissonance. That is a lesson Uighurs, Ukrainians, and Kurds have discovered, as have Meng Hongwei and Turkey’s imprisoned journalists. It is time American and European progressives recognize it as well, for the stakes are far greater than simply American power.