Trump, Putin and Xi as co-architects of a brave new multipolar world
US, Russian and Chinese leaders have historic opportunity to forge a global order more in tune with 21st century realities
The Soviet Union’s collapse and America’s current decline have remarkable similarities. The Soviet Union failed because it marginalized the entrepreneurial class. The United States is faltering because the ruling class sidelined the working class, leading to extreme economic disparity and political polarization.
In his first term, Donald Trump resembled Boris Yeltsin, the destroyer of the old order. In his second term, Trump may copy Vladimir Putin’s playbook-a nationalist builder focused on domestic affairs and rebuilding its industrial base.
Can Trump and Putin, along with China’s Xi Jinping, become the co-architects of a new multipolar world order?
The United States and Russia have more in common than they would like to admit. As American futurist Lawrence Taub pointed out in the 1980s, both countries were born out of revolutions against European empires and were based on humanitarian political ideals (freedom and social equality, respectively). And both expanded by taking over the lands of indigenous peoples during the 19th century.
Moreover, both the US and Russia have federated political structures and primarily European cultural roots. Both are multicultural — they have multiethnic populations — but are dominated culturally, economically and politically by a main group (WASPs in the US, Russians in Russia).
Cowboy and Cossack
Alexis de Tocqueville and, more recently, Paul Dukes, in his book “The Emergence of the Super-Powers” (1970), also drew parallels between Russia and the United States.
Dukes wrote that until recently each believed it had a manifest destiny, a world mission, and that the other was the principal obstacle to its success. Moreover, they had the Cowboy/Cossack mystique and a related tendency to see all political and religious issues in simplistic, black-and-white terms.
Both countries are superpowers with superpower mentalities. They are huge in size, comparable in population, and similar in climate, temperate zone location and topography. Both nations have large weapons arsenals and both have decades of experience in space exploration.
In the 1980s, Mikhail Gorbachev visited China under Deng Xiaoping. Deng successfully integrated capitalist principles into China’s socialist system, fostering economic growth while maintaining the central control of the Communist Party.
Gorbachev aimed for a similar transformation through perestroika (economic restructuring) and glasnost (political openness). However, he lacked the political support and institutional stability to implement his vision.
Instead of controlled reform, his policies accelerated economic collapse and political fragmentation, leading to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.
The failure of Gorbachev’s reforms paved the way for Yeltsin, a populist who capitalized on widespread dissatisfaction with Communist rule. Instead of refining socialism, Yeltsin dismantled it.
By abolishing Communist Party control, Yeltsin aimed to transition Russia to a Western-style democracy and market economy. However, the result was widespread corruption, the impoverishment of millions and the unchecked rise of oligarchs who consolidated wealth at the expense of the Russian people.
It paved the way for a leader who reimposed order and reclaimed Russia’s sovereignty.
Putin’s new order
Yeltsin allowed the oligarchs to dominate Russian policy but Vladimir Putin reined them in and consolidated power within the state. His strategy combined nationalism, economic control and, especially, national sovereignty, which had been under threat during the Yeltsin years.
Under Putin, Russia reasserted itself on the world stage, leveraging its energy resources and military capabilities to challenge Western dominance. While his authoritarian methods were controversial, he transformed Russia from a chaotic post-Soviet state into a formidable power once again.
Unlike the Soviet Union, the United States has not had a figure like Gorbachev-a leader influential and courageous enough to push for systemic reform.
Barack Obama had the opportunity to implement reform, particularly in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. However, rather than pushing structural changes, Obama bailed out Wall Street. This decision deepened economic inequality and fueled the populist backlash that led to Trump’s rise to power.
Trump’s first presidency bore similarities to Yeltsin’s tenure. Both leaders disrupted the political establishment, challenged entrenched elites and thrived on populist rhetoric.
Trump’s first term was characterized by chaos, institutional weakening and a focus on dismantling the old order. His policies-such as trade wars, deregulation and a focus on nationalism-reflected a broader rejection of the post-Cold War globalist consensus.
In his second term, Trump is already bidding to exert greater control over the state apparatus, much like Putin did in Russia.
Despite their similarities, however, Trump and Putin are distinct in their relationships with the super-rich. Putin, upon consolidating power, curbed the influence of Russia’s oligarchs, ensuring that the state remained dominant.
By contrast, Trump aligned himself with America’s wealthiest elites, securing support from the super-rich who benefited from his tax policies and deregulatory agenda. The structure of the American political system-where corporate influence is deeply entrenched-makes a fundamental shift unlikely.
Putin was able to centralize power in a way that Trump, constrained by American institutions and legal frameworks, may find difficult to replicate.
Toward a multipolar world
A move beyond superpower rivalry and toward a multipolar world has become all but inevitable for several reasons, among them the war in Ukraine, the formation of BRICS, the US government’s unsustainable debt and China’s growing economic, technological and geopolitical clout.
When Trump and Putin solve the Ukrainian crisis, they will have an opportunity, in consultation with China, to go down in history as the co-architects of a multipolar world. The three powers could shape a global world order suitable to the 21st century.
China is in the unique position of having integrated the two main political ideologies of the 20th century — capitalism and socialism. Deploying 10, 20 and even 50-year plans, the country arguably lifted a billion people out of poverty, took the lead in most of the Industry 4.0 technologies that will shape the 21st century and became the world’s indispensable industrial and trading nation.
With the Deng reforms of the 1970s, the Chinese rediscovered their 2,500-year-old tradition of reconciling (yin-yang) opposites, the basis of the Confucian Middle Way. Chinese Premier Xi Jinping will be able to mediate between Trump and Putin by offering Confucian words of wisdom, updated for the 21st century:
Don’t be a capitalist or collectivist; be both
Don’t be a nationalist or globalist; be both
Don’t be a realist or idealist; be both.
Xi could even quote contrarian Chinese philosopher Chuang Tzu, who pointed at the pitfalls of being rigidly attached to a fixed identity, belief or worldview:
Without praises, without curses,
Now a dragon, now a snake,
You transform with the times.
And never consent to be one thing alone.
Originally published at https://asiatimes.com on February 1, 2025.
