I really like the idea of multi-lateralism and it feels a bit underrepresented in the LW rhetoric maybe due to the US-centricity of the site?
The difference is basically between being driven by cooperation, values, norms and treaties on the multi-lateralist side and power on the multipolar side. It feels like a lot of the analysis has been based on power and this is especially true in US-China relations. This just feels obviously worse than aiming for a multi-lateral world order and based on some sort of power-concentrating assumption?
Without touching the object-level, predominance of the latter view (at least when it comes to the top level of the “civilizational hierarchy”) is what you’d naturally expect from a culture that is deeply into very deep atheism and convergent extinction-level-Goodheart[1] power-seeking consequentialist cognition.
credit to Vojta Kovařík for this term