Yet it is on this bottom board that we find most of thegreatest challenges we face today.

On this bottom board, power is widely dispersed, and itmakes no sense to speak of unipolarity, multipolarity, orhegemony.

On this bottom board, power is widely dispersed, and itmakes no sense to speak of unipolarity, multipolarity, hegemony, orany other cliché.

The bottom board includes transnational relations thatcross borders outside the control of governments – everything fromdrugs to infectious diseases to climate change to transnationalterrorism.

On this bottom board, the degree of close civiliancooperation is also important, which is affected by a country’sattractiveness or soft power.

On the bottom board of transnational relations outside thecontrol of governments – pandemics, climate change, the drug trade,or transnational terrorism, for example – power is chaoticallydistributed.

Well, I seem to be missing parts on the bottom of my board.

But on the middle board of economic relations, the world isalready multipolar, and the US cannot obtain the outcomes it wantswithout the cooperation of Europe, Japan, China, and others. And,on the bottom board of transnational issues outside the control ofgovernments – including everything from climate change to pandemicsto transnational terrorism – power is chaotically distributed, andit makes no sense at all to claim American hegemony.