Larry Johnson correctly points out that the post-New World Order world is not actually multipolar, and is better described as multinodal.
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.
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.
This is an insightful and important observation. The multipolar concept creates another Cold War setup that really isn’t the situation at all. Iran’s defeat of the USA and Israel has demonstrated that even second- and third-tier players now play roles that at times will be more significant than those of the first-tier players. In order to understand the post-WWII world and the events taking place within it, it’s going to be necessary for us to abandon our binary thinking about Soviets, Chi-Coms, and Uncle Sam being the good guy by spreading democracy.