This chapter has been written during the global coronavirus pandemic. The question thus must be: Can we use this crisis to see farther? My contribution advances four theses. First, the new millennium has brought rising multipolarity in the global distribution of hard power capabilities among sovereign states. Second, shifts in the international systemic structure have mixed implications for Latin America. Third, Latin American publics and a broad consensus of leaders share pragmatic agreement in several important policy arenas, while regional cohesion, even if partial, advances voice in global governance. Finally, recent Canadian experiences may hold some relevance for Latin America.

Multipolarity and Its Implications

The global distribution of capabilities among sovereign states is becoming more multipolar. The international system has moved from Cold War bipolarity to a brief era of unipolarity following the breakup of the former Soviet Union (USSR) and to the twenty-first century of rising multipolarity (Krauthammer 1990; Zakaria 2012; Stuenkel 2016). Two countries, the United States and a relatively rising China, will each remain larger than any others. However, in the twenty-first century, the gap between the two great powers and other major players will not be so large as to open a new era of rigid bipolarity. Western Europe is an equivalent great power to the extent it can act jointly. Britain’s choice to leave the European Union (EU), known as Brexit, likely lessens the United Kingdom’s global influence while focusing the minds, and thus strengthening the cooperation, of most remaining members. If the members of the EU, or even only the triumvirate of Germany, France, and Italy, can act collectively, then the twenty-first-century political system will have three political poles: the United States, China, and the EU.

Table 5.1 shows shifts in relative global power relations over the critical transition period 1995–2019. It draws on a new measure, the Material Capabilities Index (MCI), which combines indicators of country’s shares of global population, income, trade, technology, and military spending (Armijo, Tirone and Chey 2020). Of course, such an index must be treated with great caution, as it aggregates shares of dissimilar units and necessarily omits a wide range of factors relevant to a state’s international capacity for influence.