I Close at the End
I Close at the End January 9, 2026 The contemporary world is not witnessing the terminal gasp of a single superpower but the end of an era of unipolar dominance—a structural transition toward contested, layered authority; for the Philippines this means navigating between deterrence, dependency, and diplomatic agency under President Marcos Jr., with the risk that strategic hedging becomes strategic subordination. Premise and theoretical framing The claim that unipolarity is ending reframes decline not as the collapse of a single actor but as the dissolution of a systemic configuration in which one state’s preferences and institutions set global norms. Scholarship since the late 2000s has argued that the economic shocks of the Great Recession and the redistribution of material capabilities have rendered the assumptions of enduring American primacy untenable. This is not a teleology of inevitable American collapse but a structural diagnosis: power is diffusing horizontally (new...