Dr. Alan O'Sullivan

So...

How do you frame global balance of power for listeners that perhaps don't know what we're talking about?

Yeah, very interesting.

I suppose for people that may not be overly familiar with the words like unipolar, multipolar, you know, bipolar.

So my kind of amateur view on this and correct me if I'm wrong.

So post World War Two, we had the US and Soviet Union bipolar type situation where two main powers were.

This then, the falling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, we had the US was the main, probably the only major superpower.

And obviously the rise of China then from say 2010, which started with their intercession into the World Trade Organization in 2001.

And now we're in this situation, we're in a multipolar world.

Is that kind of fair or would you pick apart any of that and please do?

Yeah, you mentioned Marco Papic there earlier, and I read a report that he had on looking back over 250 years.

And as you mentioned, the various types of, you know, the nuances within multipolarity in terms of balancing and balanced and unstable.

And they looked at the correlation between fighting, actually conflict, hot wars, and the particular relationships or system that was there.

So it's interesting that there's obviously trends in terms of where we are today and heading into, it looks like a multipolar world.

What lessons, I suppose, can we take from history and perhaps even that research?

Yeah, it's very interesting.

So in terms of trying to quantify what is a superpower, who sits in that multipolar world, I know we can put definitions in terms of security.

Then we have economics, right?

The economic influence is very important.

So if the US's security blanket that it's offering to other countries is being retracted,