American Foreign Policy Is Lost In a Multipolar World

Key Points and Summary: America’s global strategy is unraveling, replaced by a multipolar world that Washington struggles to accept.

-Facing overstretch and limited resources, the U.S. must abandon delusions of maintaining omnipotence and adopt strategic restraint. Ukraine, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific reveal mismatches between ambitions and capabilities. America should prioritize vital interests, demand greater burden-sharing from European allies, and build sustainable defense industrial capabilities to meet modern threats.

-Rather than isolationism, restraint requires realism, strategic humility, and honest clarity about what America can—and should—achieve globally, before it’s forced into costly overreach in a fractured, uncertain, and multipolar geopolitical landscape.

American Foreign Policy: Lost in the New World Multipolar Era 

“The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men gang aft agley” – or, in standard English, “the best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry.” That line from the famous Scots poet Robert Burns lands differently in April 2025 than it did when he first wrote it – and even when it landed a year ago. We’re living in the wreckage of a world of failed strategic assumptions. The American-led order isn’t fraying. It’s fractured – it’s totally agley.

Grand strategies crafted in think tanks and federal agencies now lie scattered across a world that no longer plays by yesterday’s rules. The real crisis in international affairs today isn’t Ukraine, Taiwan, or the Red Sea. It’s that the geopolitical architecture we spent 30 years propping up has collapsed, and the foreign policy establishment still hasn’t caught up.

Multipolarity isn’t a prediction. It’s the present tense.

Washington continues to talk like it’s managing a rules-based order. But in reality, we’re negotiating a post-American world from a position of fatigue, debt, and denial. And the real danger isn’t China, Russia, or Iran. It’s the growing mismatch between U.S. commitments and U.S. capacity. We’re trying to fight on three fronts, reassure every ally, deter every rival, sanction every rogue, and still believe we’re the center of global gravity. That’s not strategy. It’s inertia with delusions of grandeur.

The age of unipolarity ended not with a bang but with a shrug – from allies, adversaries, and, increasingly, from the American people. Voters want fewer foreign entanglements, not more. They want trade deals that benefit them, not supply chains that enrich rivals. And they want leaders who know the difference between vital interests and vanity projects. In other words, they want what Washington refuses to give them: restraint.

That word, restraint, still causes palpitations inside the Beltway. It’s treated as if it means appeasement or retreat. It doesn’t. Restraint is the only strategic framework that accepts the world as it is: fractured, volatile, and no longer unipolar. It recognizes that not every fight is ours, not every ally is worth the cost, and not every crisis is a referendum on American resolve.

In Ukraine, restraint doesn’t mean cutting Kyiv off. It means recognizing that Russia will not be defeated in the way Western hawks imagine. The goal should be a negotiated settlement that preserves Ukraine’s sovereignty without dragging NATO into a forever-war that benefits no one but defense contractors. The moral case for arming Ukraine doesn’t change the strategic reality that this war must end—soon—or risk escalation on terms we can’t control.

In the Middle East, restraint doesn’t mean caving to Iran. It means admitting that our maximum pressure campaign has delivered the opposite of what it promised. Tehran is closer to a bomb than ever, the region is on fire, and the U.S. Navy is stretched thin trying to deter everyone from the Houthis to Hezbollah. At some point, we have to decide whether our presence in the region is about defending vital interests – or defending the illusion of omnipotence.

Then there’s China. The great power competition narrative has become the default framework for everything from semiconductors to maritime patrols. But this isn’t Cold War 2.0. China doesn’t want to impose a global ideology. It wants to secure its periphery, rewrite regional rules, and dilute U.S. dominance – not destroy it outright. That’s not peace. But it’s not Armageddon either. The danger lies in treating every Chinese action as existential, and every theater as decisive. That path leads to overreaction, miscalculation, and quite possibly war.

And here’s the inconvenient truth: if war does come, it won’t look like the neat scenarios sketched out in tabletop exercises. It’ll be ugly, uncertain, and attritional. Our logistics base is brittle. Our industrial capacity is hollowed out. And our naval strength is facing a reckoning. A serious confrontation with China over Taiwan would test not only our resolve – but our ability to sustain a long war at scale. That’s a test we might not pass.

Yet the answer isn’t isolationism. It’s hard-headed prioritization. The United States still has unmatched strengths – its alliances, its innovation base, its geography – but only if it stops pretending it can do everything everywhere. Strategic clarity begins with strategic humility. We need to identify our real interests – defending the homeland, deterring great power aggression in the North Atlantic and North Pacific, maintaining access to critical technologies and resources – and jettison the rest.

That means telling Europe the party’s over. The U.S. can no longer underwrite European security while Europe sleepwalks through rearmament. If NATO is to remain viable, the European pillar must become more than a metaphor. That requires not just promises on paper, but real spending, real force structure, and real political will. Otherwise, Washington should start treating Europe as a secondary theater – not a sacred obligation.

It also means treating the Indo-Pacific with more nuance and less theatrics. We need a coalition architecture that shares burdens, disperses capabilities, and prioritizes survivability m– not one that assumes American forces will always arrive first and stay longest. The days of showboating carrier groups are over. Survivability, not symbolism, is what matters now.

At home, we need a defense industrial base that can actually support the strategy we claim to have. That means re-shoring key supply chains, investing in shipyards, munitions plants, and AI-enabled systems that can outpace attritional threats. War is no longer just about platforms. It’s about production. And we’ve let that muscle atrophy for far too long.

Type 055 Destroyer from China. Chinese Navy Handout/State Media.

But most of all, we need a foreign policy that speaks the truth about the world we’re in. The postwar order is not coming back. The 1990s are not a model – they’re a mirage. And the belief that American leadership alone can stabilize a planet sliding into multipolar chaos is not just wrong – it’s dangerous.

This isn’t a call to give up. It’s a call to wake up. The best-laid schemes of mice and men in the post-Cold War era have already gone agley. The question is whether we double down on delusion – or adjust before the storm hits. The smarter path is clear. The harder part is having the courage to take it.

Because in this new world, it’s not power that we lack. It’s clarity. And clarity is what every great power needs when the center no longer holds.

About the Author: Andrew Latham 

Andrew Latham is a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities and a professor of international relations and political theory at Macalester College in Saint Paul, MN. Andrew is now a Contributing Editor to 19FortyFive, where he writes a daily column. You can follow him on X: @aakatham.