Washington’s primacy shaped the global rules, trade networks, and, most importantly, the national and internal security dynamics. The unipolar world, like other world orders, had its fair share and was bound to decline due to the dynamic global environment. As the unipolar moment fades, the Global South shifts its trajectory to Beijing and Moscow, leaving the topsy-turvy Western system behind. The main purpose of this tilt was to secure better deals, enhance partnerships and reclaim their policy space, as the unipolar world order attached numerous conditionality with their aid, rendering their sovereignty indirectly. Though this shift seems to bring about a multipolar world, the emerging multipolar order raises a question, often difficult to interpret and answer. Does having more patrons mean more sovereignty or a more complex form of dependence, giving rise to the alliance curse? The answer to this question is as complex as the multipolar world illusion, which at the surface level seems quite stable but in reality is brimming with intricacies that are difficult to sort.
The more patrons, the more options available to the developing state, without enlarging its freedom to act on its own. On the surface, it reduces vulnerabilities at many levels, but the core concept of dependency remains intact. These dependency relations create hurdles such as relying on a state for trade, seeking alternative security means by the developing states, or accepting assistance from rival states if the relations between any two states become strained. The world is brimming with such examples, such as Pakistan’s reliance on America for security and on China for economic gains. Such levers can generate bargaining power and, in some cases, tangible policy space.
The dilemma faced by the notion of bargaining power is that it is dependent on asymmetries that rarely disappear simply because there are more players. Patrons differ sharply in the scale of resources they can mobilise, their willingness to use coercion, and the conditions they attach. A wealthy lender offering low-interest loans and deep commercial markets wields a different kind of pull than a regional power willing to supply security guarantees. When states try to play patrons off against each other, they often discover that rivals coordinate informally (or through third parties) to preserve their own interests or that one patron’s economic leverage eclipses all others’ short-term inducements. The result is a more complex dependency. Policy options proliferate on paper but narrow in practice because costs, financial, political, or security-related, accrue to the actor that steps too far from patron preferences.
These dynamics give rise to the alliance curse, which is not limited to formal military alliances. The asymmetrical partnerships create a path dependency that results in committing to one patron, which, in the long run, shapes the domestic institutions and economic structure of the dependent state. This leap makes it difficult to reverse the effects, often making it costly. The sunk cost in this bargain reduces the real autonomy of the states at many levels, such as signing new deals elsewhere. Additionally, the numerous competing patrons often impose incompatible demands, varying trade standards, conditions, and geopolitical realignments, placing states in a consistent squeeze, where satisfying one partner provokes retaliation by another. On the other hand, the illusion of multipolarity remains intact, which is widely accepted internationally.
In conclusion, sovereignty in the multipolar era becomes dependent on relations rather than being absolute. States retain minimal control over their decisions, but the consequences of those decisions are increasingly moderated by external formal actors, whose power dynamics are displayed through markets, sharing of intelligence, selectivism, incentives and targeted sanctions. For many developing states, the shift from a unipolar to a multipolar world order has brought numerous other challenges that are difficult to mitigate and are muddled through by vulnerable states. The multipolar mirage has its share of benefits, but within its nature, it is brimming with certain challenges looming around it. In short, some countries will exploit that web to expand their room for manoeuvre; others will find the alliance curse deepened, trading visible dependence for layered, harder-to-escape entanglement.