Alexander Dugin's Multipolarism｜From Traditionalism to the Fourth Political Theory

America is righteous, and Iran is evil.
No, Iran is righteous, and America is evil.

Revising the constitution is righteous, and defending it is evil.
No, no, defending the constitution is righteous, and revising it is evil.

What on earth do the inhabitants of this dualistic world think they are doing? For five hundred years, the West European fantasy of empire carried on, and after World War II it became the dualism of the United States and the Soviet Union, only to settle, with the end of the Cold War, into the monism of an American empire. Today, however, the monistic imperialism of the West is finished. What remains is an America still clinging to its crumbling hegemony and a Western Europe that cannot accept that its time is over. Their sickness has summoned multipolarism, which is neither monism nor dualism, and it has set off a violent upheaval. Since one rarely hears multipolarism discussed in Japan, I want to use this issue to look at the “next idea” now rising as the West comes to its end.

In today’s context, multipolarism was born in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. As a monistic American imperialism spread across the globe in the wake of the Cold War, Evgeny Primakov, who went on to become Russia’s prime minister in the late 1990s, put forward what is known as the Primakov Doctrine, and that is where it began. Primakov, then foreign minister, argued that “Russia, China, and India should join hands and build a multipolar world that holds America’s unipolar hegemony in check.” His idea was to form a geopolitical triangle across the Eurasian continent that would restrain American dominance in economics and diplomacy, and it laid the foundation for what later became BRICS.

The core of multipolarism is remarkably simple. Values produced by a particular nation or people are, in the end, products of a particular region, and to carry them beyond those bounds into other regions with different contexts is nothing less than aggression. The obvious examples are the things the West calls “universal,” such as democracy, individualism, equality, peace, love, and class struggle. Multipolarism is a warning that these hold true only in one corner of Western Europe and must not be extended to the rest of the world. Put plainly, there is no such thing as “universal to humanity.”

Now that the United States has been utterly defeated in the Iran war of 2026, the advocates of multipolarism are warning that any further Western interference in other regions will bring on World War III. The demand addressed to President Trump, “Get out of Iran, cut ties with Israel, and go home,” is already becoming mainstream within the United States itself. Riding this current, Western commentators now openly use the very word “multipolarism” that liberal Western intellectuals once feared above all, and they insist ever more forcefully that “the West should pull out of the Middle East and Asia entirely and go home.”

For the Japanese, who are not attuned to the movements of continental politics, this context is a little hard to grasp. To begin with, there is one figure in multipolar thought who must not be overlooked. He is Alexander Dugin, whom Western liberals call “the most dangerous thinker of our time.” In Western liberal circles, his is a name that must not be spoken, much like Voldemort, “He Who Must Not Be Named,” in the Harry Potter books. That is why his name never appears in the Japanese mass media, which take their cue from Western liberals. Yet contemporary multipolarism rests on Dugin’s thought.

If the multipolarism of the former prime minister Primakov supplied the practical side of state intelligence in economics and diplomacy, Dugin’s multipolarism supplied a philosophy of civilization.

Born in 1962 as the son of a senior officer in Soviet military intelligence, Dugin has his intellectual roots in an underground salon that existed from the 1960s to the 1980s. Held in a room of the Moscow apartment of the writer Yuri Mamleev (1931–2015), the salon was the seedbed of an underground movement and came to be called the Yuzhinsky Circle. Its aim was to organize the reactionary elements that opposed the Soviet system.

Gathered in Mamleev’s room were reactionary intellectuals, poets, dissidents, and mystics who loathed Soviet atheism and materialism, and with the European mysticism that ran close to Nazism as their axis, they pursued studies in many directions, the occult among them. The young Dugin received this dangerous baptism as a formative experience, and the figure the circle revered above all as its theoretical pillar was the poet Yevgeny Golovin (1938–2010). The central figure of the salon and an outstanding thinker, Golovin used its discussions to instill a particular idea in the young people who would carry post-Soviet Russia. That idea was Traditionalism.

Though it is little known in Japan, Traditionalism, which “regards the modern age itself as the worst derailment in human history, a decline,” rejects Western values head-on and in their entirety. It is not a nostalgic longing for the past. Rather, it reads the “eternal truth” given by heaven as “tradition.” One can see it as a reaction against the Soviet Union, which proclaimed the world’s first “scientific atheism,” systematically destroyed the churches that were the cradle of faith, and drove out the clergy. Yet the Traditionalists also regarded the religions institutionalized in the modern era as a form of decline, and what they called “tradition” was an essential and unshakable “root of being” that depends on no particular doctrine. The man revered as the founder of Traditionalism is the Frenchman René Guénon (1886–1951).

Guénon was considered a dangerous man even in his lifetime, because, though French, he flatly rejected the “linear history of ever-upward progress” that modern Western Europe had conceived. His sharpest criticism was aimed at Darwinism, the theory of evolution of the Englishman Charles Darwin, which holds that humanity has always been evolving. Drawing close to Eastern and Islamic thought in order to break through the limits of the modern West, Guénon came to believe that history is always shaped by cycles. To us Japanese this is a matter of course, but modern Western Europe had no such way of thinking. In that moment, the fundamental difference between the thought of East and West cast a dark shadow over Western Europeans who flattered themselves that they had conquered the world.

Born in France, Traditionalism spread with the coming of World War II to neighboring Italy, France’s enemy at the time. This is where the Italian thinker Julius Evola (1898–1974) enters the story. The difference between the two men shows in what they taught. Guénon, baptized in Eastern thought, called for a return to the spirit through meditation, while Evola held that spiritual awakening demanded dangerous practice, struggle, and self-overcoming in extreme conditions. Both were Traditionalists, yet they differed as Zen differs from Shugendo, the ascetic practice of the mountains. Through the Tripartite Pact, to which Japan also belonged at the time, Evola came into contact with Mussolini’s Fascism and Hitler’s Nazism, but his position was fundamentally incompatible with both ideologies.

Having studied Traditionalism exhaustively, the Yuzhinsky Circle arrived at the conviction that the expansion of Western modernism was evil. The post-Soviet young people whose deepest ideas had been formed in the salon began their real activity after the Soviet Union collapsed in December 1991. In May 1993, Dugin founded the National Bolshevik Party (NBP) together with Eduard Limonov, a writer who had been expelled from the Soviet Union and had spent seventeen years in exile in New York and Paris. While leading the NBP’s radical movement, which fused the far right and the far left, Dugin published Foundations of Geopolitics in 1997. It became the bible of Russia’s military and political elite after the Soviet collapse, and it is the book that leads to today’s Eurasianism.

Raising the banners of anti-liberalism, anti-Americanism, and anti-globalism and exalting the revolutionary spirit, the NBP breathed life into Russians who had lost their identity with the fall of the Soviet Union. Between the two men, however, lay a fatal difference of thought. Dugin had set himself the goal of reviving Russia as a Eurasian empire and bringing the modern West to an end, while Limonov lived for revolution and never stopped treating the struggle against the establishment as his goal. Their aims were fundamentally different. The rift came into the open around 1998, and it was made final at the end of 1999, as the twentieth century drew to a close, by a “nobody” who appeared like a comet.

That nobody was Putin. Appointed prime minister by President Yeltsin in August 1999, Putin vaulted to acting president when Yeltsin abruptly resigned on December 31. Until then, he had been almost unknown even inside Russia. There is a famous story from the World Economic Forum at Davos in January 2000. When a foreign journalist asked the Russian panelists, “Who is Putin?”, the hall fell silent. No one knew who Putin was.

Dugin responded to this turn of events by seeing in Putin the avatar of a revived Eurasian empire, but Limonov saw nothing of the kind. So the two men parted ways, and until his death in 2020, Limonov went on denouncing his former comrade as “a dog of the regime.”

The thrust of Dugin’s multipolarism is the claim that, against the globalization pursued by America and Britain as sea powers, the Eurasian continent should be redefined as a rival land power with Russia standing at its center. What one must not miss is that he dismissed liberalism, communism, and fascism, the ideologies that ruled the twentieth century, as the worst failures in human history, all of them born of the modern West, and proposed multipolarism as a “Fourth Political Theory” to replace them.

His multipolarism, moreover, is not a dangerous ideology but a principle of governance grounded in each civilization’s own traditions and values. The one exception is the Westerners who have enjoyed the privileges of a monistic worldview, for whom it is the most dangerous idea of all. Dugin’s thought won the hearts of Iran, China, India, Turkey, and right-wing forces in Europe and America, all of whom had long found the West’s imposition of universal values stifling. What flows beneath today’s “my country first” politics, all the various “Firsts,” is his multipolarism.

Dugin had been standing against American-led unipolarism since the late 1990s, but it was the Ukraine conflict of 2014 that first brought him real attention. Responding to events in Ukraine, where the CIA had toppled the government and installed an American puppet regime, Dugin spoke of killing again and again, and he was dismissed from his professorship at Moscow State University as a result. Yet the worldwide distaste for and distrust of a United States that had begun to weaken turned the episode into a chance that only raised his standing. To stop his rise from going any further, the United States set an assassination plot in motion, and the result was the bombing of 2022 aimed at Dugin. His car was the target, but by chance he rode in a different car and survived, and in his place his daughter Daria, who was drawing attention as a promising young thinker, was killed.

Having lost his beloved daughter, Dugin framed her death as “martyrdom in the war of civilizations against the West,” and carrying his grief, he has sharpened his thought still further. Even now, Dugin’s name goes unspoken in Western liberal circles and in a Japan that lies under their influence. Yet since the Iran war, a fatal defeat for the United States, the “multipolarism” that Dugin refined and raised to a higher level has come to be discussed in the open.

What makes Dugin so adroit is that, to carry multipolarism into the West as well, he constantly invokes the concepts of Carl Schmitt, the twentieth-century German jurist whom Westerners know well, and has built into its theoretical framework Samuel Huntington, the American scholar of international politics and author of the bestseller The Clash of Civilizations. In this way he has opened a path to Americanizing and Europeanizing multipolarism. Indeed, thanks to this remarkable work of thought, the United States and Europe have today become the epicenter of multipolarism, and both the established liberals and the conservatives have become things of the past.

In other words, whatever one thinks of multipolarism, every one of us has now reached a critical juncture at which we must each reexamine “the modern” and “the West” for ourselves, because the wave of a multipolar world is already upon us. For Japan, the absolute precondition is to reexamine its history since the Meiji Restoration of 1868, when it was drawn under Western influence, and to think about how the next nation should be built.

Dualism, which settles everything in terms of black and white, did not exist in Japan before 1868. When I look at how many people today have fallen into dualism, internationally over the Iran war and at home over revising the constitution, it seems to me that the outbreak of World War III has reached a point where it can hardly be avoided. Those who would revise the constitution and those who would defend it are, after all, standing in the same ring, so the outcome will be the same either way.

Dualism always ends in catastrophe. Seen against the whole world, the Japanese are a rare people who have lived in a world that is not dualistic. Our responsibility to the world now, as Japanese, is to show the West a path that is not black and white.

Japan became the darling of the modern West, and so we bear the grave responsibility of delivering the West its last rites. Whether we succeed will decide the future of the world from here on.