In 2002 two of my American colleagues wrote in the highly influential foreign policy journal Foreign Affairs : "The United States does not have even one rival in terms of any of the significant parameters of power. Never before has there existed a system of sovereign states in which one country has had such a degree of dominance." That is what many people in America and in the world truly believed.

A couple of weeks ago, Barney Frank, the chairman of the US House of Representatives Financial Services Committee in Congress, answered the question of why the United States is not asking for material aid from other countries. "America is a big and strong daddy. But let's be realists! We are no longer the dominant force in the world" was the answer. There are only six years between the two opinions. Iraq, Afghanistan, and the financial crisis have clearly outlined the limits of American might.

Yes, the United States remains the only superpower, but by no means the only power. It is unable to handle all the challenges, and certainly not all the challenges at once. The strategy of world dominance presumes performance of the role not only of a global policeman but also a global manager. Contemporary American politics absolutely does not presume an assumption of responsibility for managing the world; it presumes a unilateral approach and the desire to ensure a free hand to resolve problems that directly affect the interests only of the United States itself and its voters.

The role of the United States as a moral leader is at an extremely low point. But then America has demonstrated the unprecedented ability to do damage to literally all the rest of humankind having launched the mechanism of a global financial crisis. The well known journalist Roger Cohen recently commented: "Let's be frank. This is an American mess created by American genius with the help of newly invented toxic financial instruments in an era when the conventional wisdom was that states are stupid but markets intelligent and there are no risks."

The American model of liberal capitalism raises more and more questions. I believe that one-tenth of those measures that Washington is now taking to nationalize banks and insurance companies and to sell them very cheaply with complete disregard of stockholders rights and to buy up "bad assets" at state expense would be enough to declare Medvedev and Putin authoritarian dictators and enemies of a free market if Moscow carried out such steps. The history that Francis Fukuyama rushed to bury in the early 1990s has returned.

The balance of powers in the world arena is changing -- visibly and rapidly. The rising centers of power -- China, Russia, and the states of the Persian Gulf -- have larger gold currency reserves than all the countries of the West combined (not counting Japan). The new rising powers -- even during the crisis -- are demonstrating the highest rates of growth in GDP and consumption. The countries that a decade ago were asking America for help are now themselves helping the United States stay afloat. Russia has acquired American state bonds worth a great deal more than the volume of US investments in our country. China is supporting its main trade partner -- America -- to the tune of $500 billion. At the same time, China recently granted a loan to Nigeria totaling more than the volume of foreign aid of all Western countries to all developing countries of the world combined.West centrism has apparently come to an end. In the 2020s three out of the four largest economies in the world will be in Asia: China, which is passing the United States, and following them come India and Japan. And the fifth and sixth will be Russia and Brazil. At the same time, the West centrist view of the world that has prevailed in intellectual discourse throughout recent centuries will disappear much earlier -- within months rather than by 2020. The rising centers of power -- unlike the era of the 1990s -- suggest not to copy the model of the West, but to follow one's own path. And we all hear more and more about the Indian, Brazilian, Russian, or Kazakhstan models as something altogether natural. The developing countries, unlike in former times, do not remain unaligned. On the contrary, they are uniting in the most varied unions, many of which America is not invited to join -- for example, the SCO (Shanghai Cooperation Organization), BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, and China), the CIS, the Eurasian Economic Union, ASEAN Association of Southeast Asian Nations),and so forth.

Among other things this symbolizes the rising crisis of the management institutions of the international system that were created in an altogether different era. The mechanisms of the United Nations, which remain most significant, have not made the world secure, especially when certain key global players have a tendency to ignore international law. The Breton Woods institutions created after World War II (the IMF and the World Bank), the expert club of wealthy countries created in 1961 represented by the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (the OECD), and the World Trade Organization are all successfully holding conferences and symposiums, issuing declarations, issuing special mandates, and carrying out
antidumping procedures. Only they cannot help save the world economy. The IMF and the World Bank, which were created as a source of rescue capital for declining economies, have a much smaller amount of free money than any of the developing countries. The "Big Seven" that gathered in Washington to rescue world finances no longer holds the commanding heights in world finance. Such discussions hardly make a lot of sense without China, Russia, India, Brazil, Mexico, South Africa, and Saudi Arabia.

After the end of the Cold War and the bipolar confrontation, there were not unjustified expectations that international relations would be demilitarized. That was in fact the case in the 1990s. But the short period of unipolarity led to drastic remilitarizationin the world (and the United States accounts for more half of all
global military spending), the destruction of the arms control system (America withdrew from the treaties banning nuclear testing, START-2, and missile defense and not one of the Western countries has ratified the CFE Treaty), the revival of the role of nuclear deterrence, and an increase in the number of nuclear powers. The crisis is creating a new reality that may make demilitarization relevant once again.

So the unipolar world is disappearing into the past. But what is arriving to replace it? I will talk about that the next time.