Author: Maciej Dachowski

In recent months we have been witnessing a very significant shift in international relations. What is changing is the way states build their position in the international system. A growing number of middle powers no longer organise their entire strategy around a single centre, nor do they treat relations with competing great powers as mutually exclusive. Instead of choosing between Washington and Beijing, the West and the Global South, or existing alliances and new formats of cooperation, they spread their ties across many partners. Security, energy, technology, infrastructure and capital no longer have to come from the same direction.

This is not classical multipolarity, in which a few great powers divide the world among themselves into spheres of influence. Nor is it the emergence of a coherent post-Western order. The change occurs at the level of the connections between states themselves. Instead of a single dominant axis, a fan of relations is increasingly taking shape. By deconcentration I do not mean the end of American primacy or the emergence of a new bloc. I mean the dispersal of dependencies, in which middle powers build several architectures in parallel, so that no single power gains a position from which it could block their strategic choices.

On 7 August, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Pakistan signed a Joint Defence Agreement, under which an armed attack on one of the states is treated as an attack on all three, a few weeks after Saudi Arabia had convened a multinational maritime coalition for the Red Sea in Riyadh. What matters here is not only the weight of the agreement itself. Turkey is not leaving NATO, Pakistan is not breaking its strategic relationship with China, and Saudi Arabia is not abandoning its cooperation with the United States. None of these states is therefore choosing a new centre. Each is expanding the number of options available to it.

Even more telling is that an alliance of this rank came into being outside Washington and without the involvement of the United States. This is not an isolated event. It fits a trend visible throughout 2026. The Mecca pact is its most recent example.

What said the most about the future balance of power this year was not the declarations of the great powers, but the calendar of meetings among middle powers, so dense and consistent that it forms a pattern rather than a random coincidence of dates. The 39th Summit of the African Union in Addis Ababa, on 14 and 15 February, opened the sequence [1], which was then filled, one after another, by the visit of Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to New Delhi on 21 February, with fourteen ministers and a business delegation of more than two hundred and sixty people, the largest in the history of Brazilian diplomacy [2], the March visit of South African President Cyril Ramaphosa to Brasília [3], and the tenth CELAC Summit in Bogotá, held from 18 to 21 March and combined for the first time in history with a CELAC and Africa Forum [4]. In April, South Korean President Lee Jae-myung signed with Prime Minister Modi a joint strategic vision opening a new phase of the Seoul and Delhi partnership [5], Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari spent a week in the Chinese provinces of Hunan and Hainan [6], and Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong toured Tokyo, Beijing and Seoul in a single week [7]. In early May, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi visited Hanoi and Canberra [8], Japan concluded its first defence pact with Indonesia after liberalising its own arms export restrictions [9], and Vietnamese President To Lam travelled to New Delhi [10].

Immediately afterwards came the signing of the Cebu Protocol, the first amendment to the ASEAN Charter since 2007, the inaugural Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi hosted by Kenya and France, and Erdogan’s signing in Astana on 14 May of thirteen agreements with Kazakhstan, including on the joint production of ANKA drones, that is, industrial cooperation between a CSTO member and a NATO member, while Modi visited the United Arab Emirates and Italy. In the same month Trump met Xi in Beijing, the first visit by an American president to China in nine years, and at the end of May Putin paid his second state visit of this term to China and Kazakhstan, combined with the summit of the Eurasian Economic Union in Astana. On 1 June, Seoul hosted the first ever meeting of the foreign ministers of Korea and Africa, with representatives of fifty of Africa’s fifty-four states, and on 3 June the UN General Assembly elected Kyrgyzstan as a non-permanent member of the Security Council for 2027 and 2028, for the first time in its history. Over the summer the pace only accelerated. On 8 and 9 July the foreign ministers of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger met Sergei Lavrov in Niamey for the second round of AES consultations with Russia [11], and on 31 July, at Lake Issyk-Kul, in Cholpon-Ata, the five states of Central Asia together with Azerbaijan, a full participant in the format since 2025, adopted the Cholpon-Ata Declaration, while Baku and Bishkek signed a treaty on allied relations, and a few days earlier the Council of Foreign Ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation had met at the same venue under the Kyrgyz chairmanship [12].

Of all these visits, signed agreements and newly created formats, none took place in Washington, none required American mediation, and none was arranged within a format in which the United States would be the host, the ally or an indispensable participant. The only episode involving the United States, the Trump and Xi meeting, was a bilateral rather than a multilateral format, and it took place in Beijing, not in Washington. This is the very process that Alexander Cooley of Columbia University and Daniel Nexon of Georgetown have described as exit from hegemony, that is, the emergence of real options outside an order built around a single power [13].

This is a picture that departs sharply from what we grew accustomed to over the past two decades. Under Barack Obama and for most of Joe Biden’s term, it was Washington that organised the key summits with the states of the Pacific, Africa and Southeast Asia. In December 2022 Biden hosted nearly fifty African leaders at the US Africa Leaders Summit, in September 2022 and again in September 2023 the White House held two consecutive US Pacific Island Country Summits, and in May 2022 the first ever US ASEAN Special Summit. New American embassies were then opened in the Solomon Islands and Tonga, and diplomatic relations were established with the Cook Islands and Niue. Diplomacy in the Indo-Pacific, in Africa and in Latin America developed with reference to the American presence, even when it took place without American participation. Meetings of Asian states with China were seen as an attempt to balance American pressure. Meetings of African states with Russia were read as a consequence of American withdrawal. Meetings of Latin American states within CELAC were interpreted as an alternative to the Organization of American States.

The second Donald Trump administration moved away from this architecture. It did not continue the format of the Pacific summits, delayed the next edition of the US Africa Leaders Summit, excluded South Africa from the December G20 summit in Miami, and in November 2025 published a National Security Strategy in which dominance in the Western hemisphere overshadowed the Indo-Pacific. The dismantling of USAID and reciprocal tariffs on African and Asian states deepened the impression of withdrawal. The European Union, although it maintained its own channels of dialogue, including summits with the African Union, CELAC and Central Asia as well as the Global Gateway programme, is present in the new geometry of middle-power meetings mainly as one of the external partners, not as a co-architect of the agenda. New initiatives, including the CELAC and Africa Forum, the AES consultations with Russia, the joint strategic vision of Korea and India, the meeting of the foreign ministers of Korea and Africa and the Cebu Protocol, came into being without direct EU involvement.

In recent months the role of the West as the main point of reference for middle and smaller powers has clearly weakened. Increasingly, they concentrate on building their own networks of cooperation in energy security, the defence industry, supply chains and climate policy. The United States, the European Union, China and Russia remain an important context for these processes, but they are no longer their sole architects. Amitav Acharya, who since 2011 has held the UNESCO Chair in Transnational Challenges and Governance and is a professor of international relations at the School of International Service at American University in Washington, calls such an arrangement a multiplex world, in which many overlapping orders and centres function side by side, with no single director of the whole [14].

A Map of New Connections

An analysis of the documents being signed and of the course of these visits shows that a similar process is unfolding in parallel across different regions of the world. Middle and smaller powers are developing their own industrial, defence and institutional capacities, preparing for global turbulence in an increasingly autonomous manner.

In the Indo-Pacific the picture is especially clear because of the concentration of events. The Japanese and Indonesian defence agreement is not a classic pact, but the first implementation of Tokyo’s new policy after the lifting of long-standing arms export restrictions, while Jakarta at the same time signs a pact with Washington, buys Chinese J-10C fighters and signs oil deals with Russia. In an approach based on dividing the world into two rival blocs, such an arrangement looks like chaos. From the perspective of Indonesia, but also of India, Vietnam, Korea and Australia, it is a deliberate spreading of security dependencies across many partners, so that none holds a blocking position. The Indian and Korean joint vision, the enhanced Indian and Vietnamese partnership, and the Japanese and Australian declaration are not moves against anyone, but a consistent shift of the weight of these relations from trade towards joint production and interoperability.

In Africa the same pattern is less legible to a Western observer, but it works in the same way. In February the organisers of the African Union Summit refused President Zelensky the opportunity to address it remotely. This did not stem from sympathy towards Russia. The motives of individual capitals vary, from the anti-colonial to the purely economic, but they are united by a growing desire to act without having to obtain legitimacy from the West, a line that African diplomacy calls pragmatic non-alignment. The point is for the summit to remain a forum on which Africa defines its own priorities.

This is also visible in the approach to the reform of the Security Council. UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in Addis Ababa that the absence of a permanent seat for Africa is indefensible. The answer to this problem, however, no longer arises in New York. Instead of seeking a reform of the Security Council, African states are shifting the weight of decisions to their own regional institutions, such as the African Union or the Alliance of Sahel States.

The clearest example is precisely the Alliance of Sahel States, formed by Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger. These three states first withdrew from the Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS, and then built their own structure alongside it. In the first quarter of 2026 they introduced a common customs tariff, a common passport, a joint armed force of five thousand troops and formal ministerial consultations with Russia. This is the same mechanism that new bilateral and regional formats are pursuing in the Indo-Pacific, namely building a new structure instead of reforming the old one. States sign agreements, launch cooperation and entrench it in practice, without waiting for the consent of the former centres.

In Latin America the significance of the change lies not in the standing of the CELAC summit itself, which drew only five heads of state, but in the first joint CELAC and Africa forum held in parallel. For the first time, the leaders of Latin American and African states, regions with a combined population of about two billion, sat at one table and adopted a common document, the Bogotá Declaration. It announces treating both regions as direct partners and developing cooperation while bypassing the former intermediaries, and at the same time it invokes the shared colonial heritage of the two continents. Brazil, which in 2026 chairs BRICS and hosts the COP30 climate summit, participates simultaneously in several such formats of Global South cooperation and becomes a place where they interlock.

Another example of the same tendency is the establishment of a maritime corridor between Colombia and Ghana, negotiated by Colombia’s first Afro-Colombian vice-president, Francia Márquez. The opening of this route creates the first direct trade connection of this decade between South America and West Africa, that is, between regions whose exchange had until now run mostly by roundabout ways, through the ports and intermediaries of Europe and North America. The new route bypasses that intermediation and connects the two shores of the Atlantic directly.

The fourth of these arrangements, the least present in Polish and European debate, may prove the most important for grasping the scale of the change under way. It concerns cooperation between the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council and the five states of Central Asia, developed since 2023 in a format known as GCC plus C5. Within two years it has moved from political declarations to concrete investments. Saudi Arabia’s ACWA Power has announced clean energy projects worth more than thirteen billion dollars in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. The Emirati company Masdar, active in renewable energy, has passed the four billion dollar threshold in Uzbekistan alone. The Saudi Development Fund, in turn, is building a portfolio of projects in the region worth more than twenty billion dollars.

The Israeli and American war with Iran, which began on 28 February 2026, accelerated this process. After Iranian retaliatory strikes on Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, it became clear that the presence of American forces in the region serves above all to protect their own infrastructure and bases, and not the security of the host states. The GCC countries began systematically to build strategic depth in the interior of the continent, alternative routes bypassing the Strait of Hormuz and a diversification of the directions of raw material supplies, and Saudi Arabia, after revising the estimate of its own mineral resources to two and a half trillion dollars, announced a mining investment programme worth one hundred billion dollars. This is no longer the geopolitics of development aid, but strategic rivalry with China and Russia conducted in an area traditionally regarded as their sphere of influence, by players whom few would have considered in this role only a few years ago.

Over the summer this economic rivalry acquired a hard security layer. Let us return to the Joint Defence Agreement signed in Mecca. It builds on the earlier Saudi and Pakistani defence pact of September 2025 and, for the first time, binds within a single arrangement three very different states, that is, a NATO member, which is Turkey, a nuclear power, which is Pakistan, and the region’s largest oil producer, which is Saudi Arabia. The Turkish foreign minister has announced that, once technical matters are settled, Egypt will also join the agreement.

The significance of this step for the whole picture is twofold. First, the agreement did not come into being in Washington, nor did it require American mediation, even though it concerns military deterrence, which for decades was the domain of the United States. Second, Turkey does not choose between NATO and the new alliance, but combines the two. Alongside the Atlantic alliance it is building a second security layer, active where NATO does not reach.

It is worth noting that the same states that are building energy and digital infrastructure in Central Asia are now also extending a security umbrella over it. Turkey is this route’s outlet to the west, towards Europe, and Pakistan its outlet to the south, towards the ports on the Indian Ocean, through a planned railway from Uzbekistan across Afghanistan to the coast. Saudi capital is already present in infrastructure projects in Kazakhstan. Economy and security are therefore beginning to overlap on the same map.

A separate and instructive case is Pakistan, which shows the same regularity from the other side. Cornered economically and politically, it does not spread its ties across many partners, but binds itself ever more tightly to one, namely China. This is visible on several levels at once. Pakistan is developing the Chinese port of Gwadar, which provides an outlet to the ocean bypassing the sensitive Strait of Hormuz, it is deepening military cooperation, as signalled by a new submarine built to Chinese technology, and it signs economic agreements directly with Chinese provinces, not only with the government in Beijing. This is the reverse of Kazakhstan’s strategy. Kazakhstan deliberately disperses its dependencies because it can afford to choose, Pakistan concentrates them on a single direction because it has no choice. The conclusion, however, is the same. No middle power can any longer afford passivity, and each, regardless of its starting point, must adopt some strategy. The fan is therefore not an ideology, but a function of the number of available options, and deconcentration itself also depends on how many alternatives a state is able to generate for itself.

It Is Happening Faster Than Most Analysts Predicted

What makes this sequence qualitatively new is not the content of the agreements themselves, since each on its own could be described as another stage in processes begun long ago. What is new is the pace and intensity of these relations. Middle and smaller powers have stopped reacting to the moves of the great powers. They act on their own initiative, treating global shocks, that is, the war in Iran, the blockade of Hormuz, the unpredictability of American policy and the withdrawal from climate agreements, as a permanent feature of the environment rather than as temporary anomalies to be waited out.

This shift has four layers. The institutional layer creates new formats instead of waiting for the reform of existing ones, formats that are light, sectoral, signed bilaterally and requiring the approval of no external institution, and even traditional and not particularly dynamic regional organisations, such as ASEAN or CELAC, are today changing the pace of their own action, as evidenced by the first amendment to the ASEAN Charter since 2007. Oliver Stuenkel, a political scientist at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, calls this the building of parallel institutions of a post-Western world, which do not replace the old ones but grow alongside them [15]. The industrial layer means concrete factories, power plants and mines. Once built, infrastructure continues to work regardless of political decisions. The narrative layer means the end of the obligation to explain oneself to the West. Middle powers no longer justify their decisions in the language of the liberal order, and the era of aligning with American policy has ended without any official announcement. The least visible but strategically most important layer is interregional coordination, that is, a common agenda of African and Latin American states, formats linking the Persian Gulf with Central Asia, and Korea and France entering a parallel bilateral game with the entire African continent, an architecture that only five years ago existed solely in rhetoric.

The pace of the change matters in itself. Most strategic analyses of recent years assumed that the process of deconcentration would take a decade or two and would have the character of gradual erosion. The war in Iran and the crisis around Hormuz did not create this process, but they sharply accelerated its transition from declarations to infrastructure and concrete commitments. States that for years spoke of diversification are implementing it within months, those that spoke of the Global South as a concept are giving it reality as a format, and those that spoke of strategic autonomy are building the infrastructure that makes it possible.

The Logic of the Fan, Not the Logic of the Axis

The most common error in interpreting these moves is to reduce them to a new cold war or to a simple polarisation of the West against the rest. This is a division that satisfies interpretive habits shaped in the twentieth century, but it does not correspond to reality. Indonesia, Australia, India, Brazil and Kazakhstan today operate simultaneously in several architectures that only five years ago were considered mutually exclusive, signing agreements in parallel with Washington, Beijing and Moscow without any sense of a need to choose. This is neither inconsistency nor hypocrisy, but a deliberate spreading of strategic ties across many partners, so that none of them holds a blocking position and no conflict between great powers closes off all of a state’s options. International relations theory calls such a strategy hedging, and its fullest account for middle and smaller powers we owe to Cheng-Chwee Kuik of the National University of Malaysia [16]. One could call it a new non-alignment, but that term captures only half of the phenomenon. The classic non-alignment of the 1960s was defensive, meant to protect post-colonial states from being drawn into other people’s conflicts. The current posture is offensive, using great-power competition as a condition for creating room for oneself, and presence in many systems as an instrument for increasing, rather than limiting, one’s own agency.

The logic of the fan works properly only when it is built deliberately and early. The states building it today do so in the conviction that within the next five years the conditions of access to markets, raw materials, technology and security will change sharply. Those that do not build it risk waking up in a situation that requires negotiation with partners with whom they did not establish operational channels when it was relatively easy. The window for action is short, and the decisions taken in the first half of 2026 are most likely of a kind that cannot be reproduced in 2030, when competition for partners will be far sharper and less flexible.

Poland Is Active, but It Acts in One Direction

If this diagnosis is accurate, Poland should be among the states building a fan fastest, because it is a middle power of considerable potential, with developed industry, the experience of transition and a place in NATO and the Union. All the more reason to look at what it actually does. The thesis that Poland is sleeping through these changes would be easy to advance were it not for the recent months, during which Polish foreign policy has been active, intensive and professional. Between 12 and 15 April, Prime Minister Donald Tusk paid a historic visit to South Korea and Japan, the first Polish visit at this level to Korea in twenty-seven years and the first to Japan in six, justifying it with a diagnosis worth quoting verbatim. “The world needs a new geopolitics. Everything has fallen apart before our eyes. A new order is taking shape before our eyes, but it cannot take shape without our participation” [17]. On 28 and 29 April, President Karol Nawrocki took part in the 11th Three Seas Initiative Summit in Dubrovnik, during which thirteen states of the region designated Poland as their representative at the G20 summit in Miami, and the Via Carpatia and Rail2Sea corridors were written into the final declaration for the first time as dual-use infrastructure [18]. On 27 May, at the Northolt base, Prime Minister Tusk and Prime Minister Keir Starmer signed a Treaty on Partnership in Security and Defence. Together with the earlier treaty with France of 9 May 2025, the February declaration on strategic partnership with Norway, the defence cooperation agreement with Germany signed on 17 June 2026 and the announced agreement with Italy, this adds up to a dense network of Poland’s bilateral arrangements within the West [19]. The agreement with Germany is, however, narrower in character than the treaties with France and the United Kingdom, because at Warsaw’s request it does not contain a clause of mutual security guarantees. Polish foreign policy does not neglect its duties, does not postpone decisions, does not hide behind inertia.

The question, therefore, is not whether Poland acts, but in what direction, and whether that direction is matched to the scale of the change that its own prime minister publicly names. Tusk says in Seoul that a new order is taking shape before our eyes, but this order is taking shape not only in Tokyo and Seoul, but above all in New Delhi, Bogotá, Hanoi, Jakarta, Brasília, Samarkand and Astana, where Poland has been absent in recent months. Tusk participates in the new order where it still most resembles the old one. Poland is developing with Japan and Korea relations that go beyond the classic Atlantic alliance, but still above all through bilateral relations, rather than through a broader strategy of presence in Asian architectures. This is a sensible and necessary direction, but qualitatively different from building a fan of ties in which no single partner holds a blocking position. Poland’s treaty network deepens the existing architecture and is qualitatively different from what Lula is doing, travelling to New Delhi, signing agreements with Beijing at the same time and maintaining a strategic dialogue with Washington. Lula builds a bridge between different architectures, Tusk deepens the one that matters most to Poland. Poland has brilliantly mastered the art of deepening existing alliances, but has not yet mastered the art of building options beyond them. The Three Seas Initiative and the G20 mandate are the most interesting of Poland’s moves in recent months, because they come close to the logic of the fan, though in a geographically narrow version, while their orientation, namely Nawrocki’s talks with the US energy secretary and the concept of Poland as a “northern gateway” for American gas, is a specialisation in the same axis in which Poland has specialised for twenty years, rather than a diversification of it.

Most telling is a fact that Polish debate does not notice. Alongside Poland at the G20 table in Miami will sit Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, two Central Asian states whose road to that table is qualitatively different from Poland’s. They operate simultaneously in six regional arrangements. They are members of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, conduct the C5+1 dialogue with the United States, belong to the Organization of Turkic States, are partners of the European Union and Central Asia summits, receive investment from the funds of the Gulf states in clean energy and take part in the Chinese CA5 format. In addition, together with Azerbaijan they are building the Trans-Caspian corridor bypassing Russia [20]. They were invited to the G20 not because of the size of their economies, but because without their participation it is no longer possible to hold a serious conversation about trade routes, critical raw materials and energy security in Eurasia. Their neighbour Kyrgyzstan, even smaller economically, holds the chairmanship of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation in 2026 and has just been elected to the UN Security Council for 2027 and 2028. Poland arrives at the same G20 summit from a different regional order, in which all strategic directions come down to one, namely Brussels and Washington.

The point is not that Poland should shift its diplomatic weight from Euro-Atlantic relations to BRICS, to the Global South or to ASEAN. That would merely swap one dominant axis for another and be equally short-sighted. The point is something that requires deeper reflection. In conditions in which the international system is changing faster than most state diplomatic apparatuses are able to notice, what has value is not so much presence in prestigious fora as the capacity to act simultaneously in many regional arrangements, none of which requires giving up the others. It is therefore not a matter of geography, but of architecture, because the same logic can encompass Asia, the Gulf and the Global South, but also the Three Seas Initiative, NATO and the Union. Poland does not need a turn towards the Global South, but a multi-vector policy within a Western strategic orientation. Nor is it a matter of copying the policy of Kazakhstan or Uzbekistan, whose geography and economic structure are entirely different, but of adopting its logic, namely participation in many formats at once, without treating them as mutually exclusive. That is precisely what Indonesia, Brazil and Kazakhstan have been teaching in recent months.

Poland consistently builds a network of bilateral strategic treaties within the West, and this network is a value in itself. It has its rational justification, because Poland’s fundamental security problem is Russia on its borders, and deterrence within NATO and partnership with the United States remain the foundation, not one of several equal options. Poland’s problem is not concentration on the West. The problem is that concentration on the West has not been complemented by a second layer of relations that would increase Poland’s economic and political agency beyond the basic security system. Poland diversifies its partners, but it does not diversify the architectures in which it operates. Focusing almost exclusively on deepening a single alliance axis is a sensible approach as long as that architecture remains the centre of the system, but in conditions in which other middle powers deliberately spread their ties across many architectures, concentration in one becomes a risk, because unspread security ties work well only as long as none of their elements fails.

The deepest problem, however, lies not in the activity of Polish diplomacy itself, but in the way Poland reads its own position. The invitation to the G20 in Miami is sometimes treated as a moment of triumph, as the culmination of a thirty-year path of strategic advancement, as entry into the top league. Except that the league we are entering, in the course of our climb, has ceased to be the one we knew. Ten years ago the G20 was the main forum on which the rules of the financial, climate and regulatory system were set. Today the G20 still groups most of the world’s GDP, but the rules of the system are to a large extent set outside it, in smaller formats, faster and with other players. We are therefore entering a summit whose function is different from a decade ago, because it sets the rules of the system on its own to a lesser degree and to a greater degree reflects the growing competition between different centres of influence, and we treat that entry as if the forum were still what we imagined it to be a decade ago.

Entry into the G20 makes strategic sense only if Poland uses it to launch its own game, which it has not so far conducted. That game would require a permanent operational presence in the capitals where Polish diplomacy has not until now functioned at a strategic level, that is, in New Delhi, Brasília, Jakarta, Hanoi, Riyadh, Astana, Pretoria and Bogotá, a presence going beyond a diplomatic mission and encompassing Polish development banks and investment funds in local raw material and infrastructure projects. It would also require a concrete offer, which Poland does not today formulate, even though it has something to trade, possessing a defence industry that is convincing in conditions of real war, experience in gas and nuclear energy, agriculture, information technology and the lessons of a thirty-year transition that many states of the Global South regard as a model. It would finally require non-obvious alliances, that is, strategic relations with states outside the classic Euro-Atlantic axis, which Poland has never built, while states much smaller than it do so today as a matter of routine. Behind this lies a deeper change of perception. The states that Polish debate still describes collectively as the Global South and treats as a peripheral category are today one of the places where the rules of trade in critical raw materials, debt management, UN reform and climate policy are set. Without its own presence in these discussions, Poland cedes the representation of part of its interests to other centres, above all to Brussels and Washington, whose priorities do not always coincide with Poland’s.

The question that follows is not how Poland is to find its place in the new world, but whether Polish foreign policy is able to notice that the new world has already begun, and not on a distant strategic horizon, but in the course of the ordinary diplomatic calendar of the past several months. Tusk formulated the diagnosis correctly in Seoul. The question is not about the diagnosis, but about the instruments, institutions, people, contacts, banks, funds and concepts through which one could become a maker of reality rather than a passive observer. The ties now forming in Astana, Bogotá, Jakarta and Brasília rest on their own resources and on their own internal logic. Poland can still enter them, if it builds the tools it has not so far built. But the time for that decision is now measured in months, not in years. Let us return, at the end, to Mecca. It showed that three states can build their own security arrangement without Washington, even though all three remain its partners. The question for Poland, therefore, is not whether it should stop trusting the United States, but whether it can build enough of its own relations so that, even while preserving that alliance, it is not dependent on a single architecture of action. Deconcentration does not mean choosing a new centre. It means the capacity to act even when the former centre ceases to suffice.

Notes

[1] African Union, 39th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government, Addis Ababa, 14 and 15 February 2026; UN News, „Guterres tells AU Summit: This is 2026, not 1946 in push for reform”, 16 February 2026.

[2] Ministry of External Affairs (India), Joint Statement on State Visit of President of Brazil to India, 21 February 2026; The Indian Express, „Brazil sends largest-ever delegation to India as President Lula visits with 260 firms and 14 ministers”, 13 February 2026.

[3] Department of International Relations and Cooperation (Republic of South Africa), „President Ramaphosa to strengthen Brazil ties on State Visit”, 8 March 2026.

[4] Vice Presidency of Colombia, First CELAC, Africa High-Level Forum, Bogotá, 18 and 21 March 2026; ColombiaOne, „CELAC, Africa Forum Confronts the Past, Strengthens Ties in Colombia”, 22 March 2026.

[5] Ministry of External Affairs (India), Joint Strategic Vision for the India, Republic of Korea Special Strategic Partnership, 20 April 2026; ISAS National University of Singapore, „President Lee Jae-myung in India: Boosting Strategic Industrial Collaboration”, 23 April 2026.

[6] President of Pakistan, press release on the State Visit to China, 25 April and 1 May 2026; The Diplomat, „Why the Pakistani President’s Visit to China Amid the West Asia Crisis Is Important”, 28 April 2026; South China Morning Post, „Pakistani president seeks to bolster full spectrum of ties with China on visit”, 28 April 2026.

[7] Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, „Visit to Japan, China and the Republic of Korea”, media release, 27 April 2026; Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China, „Wang Yi Holds China, Australia Foreign and Strategic Dialogue with Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong”, 30 April 2026.

[8] Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Japan, „Prime Minister TAKAICHI’s visit to Viet Nam and Australia”, 1 and 5 May 2026; The Diplomat, „Sanae Takaichi’s Canberra Visit”, 8 May 2026.

[9] Ministry of Defense of Japan, „Joint Press Statement, H.E. Shinjiro Koizumi, Minister of Defense of Japan and H.E. Sjafrie Sjamsoeddin, Minister of Defence of the Republic of Indonesia”, Jakarta, 4 May 2026; Reuters, „Indonesia, Japan sign defence cooperation agreement”, 4 May 2026.

[10] Prime Minister of India, „Joint Statement on Enhanced Comprehensive Strategic Partnership between the Republic of India and the Socialist Republic of Viet Nam”, 6 May 2026; Vietnam News Agency, „A new phase in Viet Nam, India relations”, May 2026.

[11] Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, „Russia, Confederation of Sahel States ministerial meeting”, Moscow, 3 April 2025 (first session); second session of the AES and Russia consultations, Niamey, 8 and 9 July 2026 (TASS, APA News); GIS Reports, „Juntas and Moscow reshaping Sahel alliances”, 2026.

[12] ASEAN Main Portal, „Chair’s Statement of the 48th ASEAN Summit”, Cebu, 8 May 2026; African Union and Republic of Kenya, Africa Forward Summit communique, Nairobi, 11 and 12 May 2026; Ministry of External Affairs (India), BRICS Foreign Ministers’ Meeting, New Delhi, 14 and 15 May 2026; Organization of Turkic States, Informal Summit, Turkistan, 15 May 2026; The Astana Times and SpecialEurasia, coverage of Putin’s state visit to Astana, 27 to 29 May 2026; Élysée Palace, Joint Statement on the State Visit of the President of Indonesia to France, 28 May 2026; Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Korea, Korea-Africa Foreign Ministers’ Meeting Joint Statement, Seoul, 1 June 2026; UN News, „Kyrgyzstan wins seat on UN Security Council for first time ever”, 3 June 2026. Informal Consultative Meeting of the Heads of State of Central Asia and Azerbaijan and the Cholpon-Ata Declaration, Cholpon-Ata, 31 July 2026; Council of Foreign Ministers of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation, Cholpon-Ata, July 2026; Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan, Makkah Joint Defence Agreement, communique 204/2026, and Saudi Press Agency, Joint Statement of the Makkah Al-Mukarramah Summit for Joint Defence, 7 August 2026; Saudi initiative for a multinational maritime coalition for the Red Sea, Riyadh, 2026.

[13] Alexander Cooley, Daniel Nexon, Exit from Hegemony. The Unraveling of the American Global Order, Oxford University Press, New York 2020.

[14] Amitav Acharya, The End of American World Order, Polity Press, Cambridge 2014 (2nd ed. 2018), from which the concept of the multiplex world derives; see also the same author, The Once and Future World Order, Basic Books, New York 2025.

[15] Oliver Stuenkel, Post-Western World. How Emerging Powers Are Remaking Global Order, Polity Press, Cambridge 2016.

[16] Cheng-Chwee Kuik, „The Essence of Hedging. Malaysia and Singapore’s Response to a Rising China”, Contemporary Southeast Asia, vol. 30, no. 2 (2008), pp. 159 ff.

[17] Chancellery of the Prime Minister, „Wizyta premiera Donalda Tuska w Korei i Japonii”, 12 and 15 April 2026; Defence24, „Historyczna wizyta premiera w Azji. Polska wzmacnia relacje z Koreą i Japonią”, April 2026; Defence24, „Tusk w Korei i Japonii: zbrojeniówka priorytetem, w tle bilans handlowy i technologie”, 13 April 2026; Asian Affairs Centre, University of Łódź, „Dynamiczna Korea, stabilna Japonia: o partnerstwach z Polską”, April 2026.

[18] Chancellery of the President of Poland, „Szczyt Inicjatywy Trójmorza w Dubrowniku”, 28 and 29 April 2026; Polsat News, „Szczyt Trójmorza. Prezydent Nawrocki: Polska gotowa, by stać się bramą północy”, 28 April 2026; Euronews, „Szczyt Inicjatywy Trójmorza w Dubrowniku i jego nowa rola w zmieniającym się porządku globalnym”, 29 April 2026; Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego, letter of intent on the Three Seas Initiative Infrastructure Fund of Funds, 28 April 2026.

[19] Chancellery of the Prime Minister, „Przełomowy traktat polsko-francuski podpisany w Nancy”, 9 May 2025; „Polska i Norwegia wzmacniają partnerstwo strategiczne i militarne”, February 2026; „Donald Tusk i Giorgia Meloni zapowiadają nowy etap współpracy Polski i Włoch”, 7 May 2026; „Traktat Polska, Wielka Brytania o Partnerstwie w Dziedzinie Bezpieczeństwa i Obronności”, Northolt, 27 May 2026; Ministry of National Defence, defence cooperation agreement between Poland and Germany, signed by ministers Władysław Kosiniak-Kamysz and Boris Pistorius, Warsaw, 17 June 2026.

[20] European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, „The Trans-Caspian Transport Corridor”, 2023; Council of the European Union, First EU, Central Asia Summit, Samarkand, 3 and 4 April 2025; Xinhua, „China and Central Asia Leaders Hold First Summit in Xi’an”, 19 May 2023; The Diplomat, „Washington Hosts Central Asian Leaders in C5+1 Format”, November 2025.