Professor Geoffrey Roberts, in Responsibility to Protect: Great Powers in a Polycentric World (published in Russia in Global Affairs, Vol. 24, No. 1, January–March 2026), argues that stable multipolarity requires a deliberately managed settlement among great powers rather than unilateral dominance or automatic balance-of-power outcomes. He situates this claim historically, moving from Yalta to the nineteenth-century Concert of Europe and Cold War détente, to show repeated attempts to organize rivalry into order through restraint, shared rules, and collective responsibility. Yalta, Roberts emphasizes, was not primarily about dividing the world into rigid spheres of influence but about stabilizing a sovereignty-based international society, with the United Nations designed as the institutional successor to earlier concert systems.
Central to Roberts’s argument is the concept of a “global political equilibrium,” understood as a condition in which rivalry among great powers persists but is contained by a shared commitment to systemic stability rather than competitive domination. Drawing on thinkers such as Maxim Litvinov and Walter Lippmann, he highlights the idea of defined spheres of security and responsibility that limit interference in the domestic affairs of smaller states while anchoring their external security. These ideas, Roberts argues, offer a normative alternative to coercive spheres of influence by embedding great-power power within rules and mutual restraint.
Roberts illustrates how this equilibrium has operated in practice through regional and sub-regional examples, including the Concert of Europe, the postwar Finland–Soviet relationship, and the consultative and arms control mechanisms of 1970s détente. These cases demonstrate how localized arrangements can translate abstract principles of restraint into workable political practice. At the contemporary level, he treats institutions such as BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation as partial and imperfect efforts to revive great-power coordination, while stressing that institutions alone cannot substitute for political will.
The principal constraint, Roberts argues, lies with the United States. He is explicit that “without the wholehearted participation of the United States, the new, multipolar world will be inherently unstable,” identifying U.S. exceptionalism and domestic politics as major obstacles to inclusive post–Cold War settlements. At the same time, he notes that the 2025 U.S. National Security Strategy affirms that “the world’s fundamental political unit is and will remain the nation-state,” which he interprets as a limited opening for dialogue on a sovereignty-centered order. Roberts concludes that the central strategic task for advocates of multipolarity is to persuade and incentivize Washington to accept reciprocal restraints and participate in a collective great-power compact capable of sustaining a stable global political equilibrium.