[Before diving into tonight’s featured article I want to offer a brief comment on John Ratcliffe’s strange visit to Moscow. The key for me is the C-17. Why use that plane? The CIA Director has a Gulfstream V (GV), which has a published maximum range of about 6,500 nautical miles, more than enough to reach Moscow. Commodore Steve Jermy has offered up the best possible explanation… Ratcliffe was picking up the bodies of dead CIA officers that the Russians had collected. Coffins travel better on a C-17 than a GV.]
Every commentator now reaches for the same word. The American century is ending, the dollar’s grip is loosening, new blocs are forming, and the world, we are told, is becoming “multipolar.” The word feels precise. It is not. “Multipolar” imports a set of twentieth-century assumptions that actively misdescribe what is emerging in the global economy, and because the word we choose determines what we look for and what we measure, the wrong word produces the wrong analysis. There is a better one, and it is not merely a matter of style. The order taking shape is multinodal.
The distinction matters most precisely in the domain where change is fastest — the geoeconomic one, the world of payment rails, trade corridors, currencies, energy routes, and supply chains. That is a networked world, and networks are made of nodes, not poles.
What “pole” smuggles in
A pole is a concept borrowed from physics and from Cold War strategy, and it carries freight. Start with the geometry: poles come in pairs. They are, by definition, opposed and equivalent — the north pole implies the south, the Soviet pole implied the American. Reach for the word “multipolar” and you have already imported the idea of a small number of roughly matched centers arranged in opposition. As one analyst has dryly observed, poles are paired opposites of comparable weight — and whatever else the present moment is, it is not a set of equivalent, opposed centers.
The metaphor smuggles in more than geometry. A pole is a center of gravity; lesser bodies orbit it. Built into the word is hierarchy — great powers at the center, clients in the surrounding spheres — and exclusivity, because a body can only fall within one gravitational well at a time. Built in, too, is a particular measure of power: mass. Polarity counts poles by aggregate weight — GDP, military spending, population — the heavier the body, the stronger its pull. And underneath all of it sits the realist picture of world order as a vertical structure with a hegemon, or contending hegemons, at the apex, where power means the capacity to coerce and security means avoiding defeat.
That is a serviceable vocabulary for describing armies and alliances. It is a poor one for describing the plumbing of the world economy.
What “node” captures instead
A node is a different kind of object. It is a point in a network, and it is defined not by its mass but by its connections — by how many links run through it and how much flows across them. A 2024 essay in the China International Strategy Review put it well: a multinodal world is an asymmetric matrix of actors, each embedded in a web of relationships, in which the horizontal business of continuous interaction matters more than the vertical business of one power imposing on another. Scholars at Spain’s Elcano Royal Institute, tracing the same shift in security affairs, describe a system of nodes, modes, and flows in which, crucially, flows simply bypass reluctant or hesitant nodes to keep moving.
Hold those two pictures side by side and the difference becomes concrete. Nodes are many, and they vary wildly in size. They are joined by multiple, redundant links rather than arranged around a single center. They are non-hierarchical — a mesh, not a pyramid. They are measured by throughput, not tonnage. And they are non-exclusive: a node can be wired into a dozen other nodes at once, which is something no body orbiting a pole can do. That last property is not a footnote. It is the defining behavior of the present moment, and the pole metaphor renders it invisible.
Power as throughput, not mass
Consider how power actually operates in the world this series has been documenting. The dollar’s dominance was never a matter of American economic mass alone; it was a matter of position in a network. Nearly everyone had to clear payments through nodes the United States controlled, and that mandatory-passage property — not the size of the U.S. economy — is what made sanctions bite. Political scientists Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman gave this its proper name: weaponized interdependence, the power that accrues to whoever sits astride the chokepoints others must traverse. The Strait of Hormuz, the dollar-clearing system, the CIPS network, a handful of Chinese refineries, a fleet of shadow tankers — these are the coordinates of contemporary power, and every one of them is a node, valued for what passes through it.
This is why “multipolar” keeps producing bad predictions. It tells the analyst to tally great powers by mass, and so he counts the United States, China, perhaps Russia and India and the EU, and stops. He misses that a small state can be an enormous node — that the UAE, Singapore, Qatar, or a port like Gwadar can command flows out of all proportion to their weight. Polarity has no way to see them. Nodality is built to.
Networks reroute; poles do not
The single most important property of a network is that it routes around damage. Block one path and the flow finds another; the more redundant the links, the more resilient the whole. This is the entire de-dollarization story rendered in one sentence — and it is a sentence “multipolar” cannot form.
When Washington weaponizes the dollar node, the response is not for the world to huddle around a rival pole. It is to build alternative nodes — CIPS clearing yuan outside the dollar system, mBridge settling in digital currency beyond correspondent banking, gold and barter and swap lines — until no single node is mandatory and the chokepoint loses its grip. The Elcano formulation is exact: flows bypass the reluctant node to sustain their fluidity. Every sanction is thus an instruction to the network to grow a bypass, and every bypass makes the next sanction weaker. That dynamic — the core geoeconomic story of the decade — is perfectly legible in nodal terms and literally unsayable in polar ones, because poles do not reroute. They only pull.
States hedge across nodes; they do not pick poles
Watch what states are actually doing, and the vocabulary of poles collapses entirely. Japan protests Russia over the Kuril Islands while fighting to keep buying Russian gas from Sakhalin. Turkey sits inside NATO while depending on Iran for an eighth of its natural gas. Pakistan is a major non-NATO ally of the United States while deepening its trade with Iran, with China at its back. Saudi Arabia and the UAE run on the dollar while joining the yuan’s clearing network and the digital-currency platform built to bypass the dollar. The Mecca-pact states are American clients constructing a mutual-defense bloc that may yet admit Iran.
Ask “which pole is each of these near?” and you get nonsense, because the question assumes an exclusivity that no longer exists. Ask instead “to how many nodes is each connected, and how is it working to reduce its dependence on any one?” and every one of these behaviors snaps into focus. This is multi-alignment — the deliberate cultivation of many connections and the refusal of exclusive membership — and it is the rational strategy of a node in a mesh, not the deviant behavior of a body that cannot decide which sun to orbit. The overlapping memberships of the age — BRICS and the SCO and the GCC and NATO and CIPS and SWIFT, all intersecting — are not a muddle to be tidied into camps. They are the native structure of a nodal world.
The honest limit
None of this makes “multipolar” worthless, and precision cuts both ways. There is genuine concentration in the system: the United States and China are super-nodes whose gravitational pull is real, and great-power rivalry has not been abolished by the language of networks. For the military-strategic dimension — deterrence, alliances, the hard geometry of force — the older vocabulary of powers and spheres still has purchase, and a serious analyst keeps it on hand. Multinodality is not a claim that all nodes are equal; it is a claim about the shape of the whole, which is a mesh of radically unequal hubs rather than a lineup of matched and opposing poles. The argument is not that concentration has vanished. It is that the topology is a network, and a network is described by its nodes.
Words are lenses, and the lens determines the data. Reach for “multipolar” and you will count great powers, sort the world into camps, and wait for the blocs to harden — and you will keep being surprised when the dollar springs a leak, when a mid-sized state punches ten times its weight, when a treaty ally keeps trading with the adversary, when a sanction accelerates the very escape it was meant to prevent. Reach for “multinodal” and you will map connections and measure flows, and all of it resolves into a single, coherent phenomenon: a world rewiring itself from a hub-and-spoke system with one mandatory center into a dense mesh with many. That is not a multipolar world coming into being. It is a multinodal one — and getting the noun right is the first requirement for seeing it clearly.
Great conversation with Jim Webb, including why Ratcliffe went to Moscow:
CIA Moscow meeting was the topic of the day with Danny Davis:
Ditto for Ed DeMarche, editor of Trends Journal:
Garland Nixon and I drilled down on the global diesel breakdown:
Nima and I discussed what appears to be Trump’s hardening position against reactivating the MoU:
Mario is back and we discussed Iran’s new warning to Netanyahu:
I've been noticing for about a year that some commentators have insisted on using multinodal over multipolar. I had assumed the difference was arcane and academic. Larry made it come to life, and make total sense. Thank you!
Makes sense! Thanks Larry.