Are Trump and Xi reviving bipolarity?

(The article was originally published in Indian Express as a part of Dr Ram Madhav’s column titled Ram Rajya on May 16, 2026. Views expressed are personal.) 

Global developments raise an important question. Are we heading again towards bipolarity of a different kind? The hype surrounding President Donald Trump’s visit to Beijing this week and broad outcomes as reported by both countries indicate that the politics of big power hyphenation is back.

After the collapse of the Communist regime in Soviet Union in 1991, many strategic thinkers in US dreamt of a single power dominance. Francis Fukuyama, the Stanford political scientist, wrote an essay calling it the “end of history”. He predicted that there would only be one way forward for the world and that would be the American way of liberal democracy. His own guru, Samuel Huntington, a renowned Harvard professor, challenged the thesis through his famous book “The Clash of Civilisations” two years later in 1993, in which he had predicted a civilisational conflict involving various regions that would come to challenge the supremacy of the US. Huntington’s theory was pilloried by many liberal political thinkers. But he was not too off the mark. Soon, the US ran into trouble with the Islamic world and faced repeated attacks from Islamic terrorists on its assets, culminating in the World Trade Centre attack in New York in 2001.

That phase of early 21^st Century also saw several middle powers and some minilateral and plurilateral groupings emerging as important players in the world. The phrase “multipolarity” came into vogue indicating that the world was no longer “unipolar” under the hegemony of the United States. Many believed that a multipolar set up where regionalism and localism play a dominant role will be a good model for international governance as interests and interactions can be better managed in a multipolar setting than an arrangement dominated by one or two big powers. There were sceptics and cynics too who dismissed the idea. Most of them were American apologists who saw any talk of multipolarity as a rejection of America’s superpower status. For the protagonists, multipolarity was much more a shield from China domination than that of the US. The sceptics argued that no other country can match America’s economic, technological and military power and hence the talk of multiple poles was a fantasy. Not necessarily. Several instances in last two decades, including the latest war in Iran, proved that power asymmetry doesn’t always prove the powerful to be successful. In fact, in the last two decades, many middle powers – individual nations like India, Russia, Brazil, Turkey, France and South Africa or plurilateral groupings like the ASEAN, EU, Quad and BRICS – rose as prominent players in global politics.

That scenario seems to be changing now, with two reigning superpowers of the world – US and China – wanting to take matters in their own hands. In the last fifteen years, there was a realisation in the US that China has risen to challenge its supremacy and dominance in the world. Earlier, Presidents Bill Clinton and George Bush believed in coopting China in the hope that its economic rise would make it more liberal, democratic and responsible. If Clinton made two visits to Beijing in his tenure, Bush made four visits. It was during Obama’s presidency that the US started realising that China was rising to become too powerful and a challenge to US supremacy. The Quadrilateral Security Review of the Pentagon, in 2010, for the fist time, while welcoming “a strong, prosperous, and successful China that plays a greater global role”, also fretted about Beijing’s defence spending and governance processes, noting that they raised “a number of legitimate questions regarding its long-term intentions”. US’ apprehensions about China challenge grew louder in the following years.

Rise of President Xi Jinping to the leadership position in 2013 further confirmed that the country has ambition for global supremacy and domination. Under Xi’s leadership China demonstrated impressive progress in many areas including deep-tech, defence and space. It almost caught up with the US in many modern areas of development. During his more than a decade’s leadership, Xi used several occasions to drive home that China has arrived and was in the same league of the US. He was consistent in last one decade in insisting that the US and China together should ensure security and prosperity of the world and humanity. At the Busan meeting in South Korea last October, on the sidelines of the APEC summit, Xi told Trump that “China and the US can jointly shoulder our responsibility as major countries and work together to accomplish more great and concrete things for the good of our two countries and the whole world”. A year before, in March 2024, during a meeting with US business leaders in Beijing, Xi observed that whether the two countries can find the right way to get along bears on the well-being of the two peoples and the future of the humanity.

These days, Xi uses the metaphor of a “giant ship” to describe US-China relations. He used the metaphor several times including at Busan and also in his telephonic conversations with Trump. What the metaphor essentially says was that the world is a turbulent waters and the US and China relationship should steer clear of the turbulence diligently. On his part, Trump had, on more than one occasion, used the metaphor of G-2 to describe the US-China relationship. “The G-2 will be convening shortly”, he declared on social media a day before his meeting with Xi at Busan. He repeated it again after the meeting too.

Both US and China seem losing interest in sharing platforms with other powers in plurilaterals. If the US is showing disinterest in Quad and NATO, China too doesn’t seem too enthusiastic about forums like BRICS and G-20, especially when it came to the leadership of countries like India.

All this takes us back to that first question – Is multipolarity dead? Are we heading back to a new bipolar world order?