Stephen Sefton, March 3rd 2026
Self-evidently, people’s expectations of the developing multipolar world vary according to how they interpret the concept of a world composed of different centres of power each with their own respective networks of diverse regional influence and support. Optimism has burgeoned about the prospects for greater respect for all countries’ sovereignty and security concerns, more diverse options for financial and commercial transactions, wider access to advanced technology and more diverse and reliable communications media, among a plethora of other matters. Pessimists acknowledge advances in some of these areas but argue, for example, that most of the majority world remains subject to US-led NATO country domination militarily, financially and in terms of information media and artificial intelligence. The attack on Venezuela at the start of the year bears out this pessimist interpretation.
The converse of the undeniable advances in a new world order, which has already changed international relations, has been the decline of the US and its network of vassals above all relative to the main countries of Eurasia. As the war against Iran is now demonstrating conclusively, the US is definitely no longer the most powerful country in the world militarily. In Ukraine its military equipment and leadership have been shown to be categorically inferior to that of the Russian armed forces. The US armed forces deployed against Iran now face the probability of defeat and possibly a complete debacle. Given the current state of its armed forces, the US government and its allies are simply unable to sustain a successful direct military campaign against an adversary as militarily sophisticated as Iran in such close proximity to Iran’s strategic allies China and Russia.
The war of the collective West against Iran has two main aspects derived from a single neocolonial rationality. The US and its NATO vassals, with the complicity of their regional Arab allies have attacked Iran on behalf of the Zionist colonial settler regime currently occupying Palestine, but also to attack the majority world’s efforts to achieve a more democratic international order based on equality and respect between nations and adherence to international law. The underlying rationality of the collective West, embodied by the Zionist genocide in Palestine, is the racist neocolonial imperative to dominate the majority world, suppressing the legitimate development of independent sovereign nations so as to guarantee the Western ruling élites' uncontested access to the world’s resources.
As the regional conflict in West Asia develops, the US and its allies will almost inevitably reach the point where neither their direct military power can prevail nor their efforts to overthrow Iran’s government using proxies like the Kurdish militias or different terrorist organizations. At that point, the criminal US leadership and their Zionist accomplices will certainly consider the use of nuclear weapons against Iran. That eventuality will demand decisive intervention by Russia and China, given that both governments have decisively encouraged and supported Iran’s non-nuclear status. Even the threat of a nuclear attack on Iran constitutes the ultimate menace to the possibility of bringing about a more just multipolar international order, which is self-evidently supported by the majority world.
Right now, countries engaged with China and Russia, in particular, have concrete material experience of the benefits of the developing new international order. In terms of trade, finance, infrastructure and development cooperation relations with Russia and China, smaller majority world countries are progressively more able to free themselves from the neocolonial Western model of unjust debt and phony aid. It has been absolutely obvious since at least 2005 that time has been steadily running out for the collective West to reach a peaceful accommodation with powers like Russia or China.
Instead, they made China the ultimate target of a blatantly signaled campaign of systematic international destabilization ranging across Eurasia especially. After 2014, the US and its allies decided to provoke the war against Russia which began in 2022 and then, after destroying Syria, they increased their unilateral coercive measures and began planning to conquer Iran militarily. Now, time has run out on that project and the Western elites are in fact suffering a broad front strategic military defeat to which they will definitely respond by threatening nuclear war. All this is happening because they refuse to accommodate peacefully to the emerging multipolar world which has now effectively ended their global domination.