Bangladesh, Jan. 19 -- For more than two decades, analysts, strategists, and dissident thinkers have argued that the post–Cold War international system was living on borrowed time. The claim that a single superpower could indefinitely dominate global affairs under the banner of liberal internationalism always sat uneasily with the realities of power, history, and interest. That debate is now effectively over. What was once theoretical has hardened into policy: the era of unipolar American hegemony has ended, and in its place a transactional Tripolar Order has emerged as the operating system of 21st-century geopolitics.

This new order is not rhetorical, aspirational, or cloaked in universalist ideals. It is blunt, managerial, and un...