A constitutive value in the sphere of security - especially international and interstate security - is a clear and understandable situation in terms of rules, mechanisms and recognized hierarchy that hold systemic relations together in a specific, coherent formula. This situation enables prosperity and protects against negative systemic escalations and disintegration in the sphere of international security. However, this was a rare situation historically, and certainly interspersed with phenomena that were antithetical to the above-mentioned model. Similarly, a much more common and unfortunately undesirable - for most people - system climate is, firstly, the state of absence of the above-mentioned elements, leading to the sequential anarchization of the system security environment, and secondly, a set of phenomena behind which there is a systemic or selective negation of a given structure of the functioning security architecture.. In each of the above-mentioned variants, international leadership plays a special role as a certain splendor, but more often a challenge of constantly confronting the variability of its legitimacy. This article examines the cross-section of the dynamics of changes in the field of leadership (as an ambition and status category, but also subject to pressure, claims and assessments) and its translation into the perspectives of the tectonics of the contemporary global security architecture. The author's intention, and at the same time the aim of the work, is to fill the research gap in the field of updating and cross-sectional reflection on the contemporary struggles of great powers for international leadership (and their potential consequences) in the contemporary global security architecture as an arena of historically unprecedented interdependence and complexity of competition. The reason for taking up the issue is the lack (especially in Polish literature on the subject) of a realistic perception of the changes taking place, creating a dangerous illusion based on which Polish security policy cannot be designed. The main research problem of this article (supported by detailed problems) is: what international leadership, with what profile, attitude and impact on global security (and main challenges), does the world currently need, and what is possible? By using the methods of analysis and synthesis, comparisons and abstraction, which is necessary in the context of the analysis of the attitudes of great powers, this article aims to come closer to properly concluding the potential offers and ambitions of world/international leadership - primarily the USA, China and Russia (as well as the EU and grouped in the category of emerging powers, states constituting an influential axis of legitimization and delegitimization of the "great" ones). When announcing the conclusions of the article, their slightly pessimistic and warning tone should be emphasized. Because among the proportions: ambitions and constructive offers "for" international security versus "ambitions and offers against the other side", the latter negative, destructive variant dominates for now, which is only supposed to be a possible means to the ultimate goal. Although there should be no illusions about the altruistic nature of superpowers and leadership (despite the appearance of "offers"), this places the world in a specific climate of confrontational actions - the entire spectrum of "bidding" of their offers by superpowers. The only positive (although it requires rationality and self-preservation instinct of the superpowers and greater awareness of a world that often sees certain events in a "tunnel") is that the larger number of entities actively involved in the debate on the proper construction of the contemporary global security architecture (GAB) remains, after all, in a certain systemic interdependence, a new quality will emerge, preferably in the form of the dominant ability to create and coordinate global security mechanisms by the West, reflected on the basis of the worked-out calculation of errors (in terms of others and thinking about its own power).