Spheres of Influence Are Not the Answer
The Oval Office clash between U.S. President Donald Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky before a full-court media, U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio stating that Ukraine is “not our war,” and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s acquiescence to any U.S. annexation of Greenland have increased speculation on whether the United States is jettisoning the decades-old model based on allies and partners and adopting a spheres-of-influence approach in its grand strategy. These signals have been buttressed by Trump’s recent speech in Saudi Arabia, in which the president rejected what he saw as previous U.S. presidents’ tendencies to “look into the souls of foreign leaders and use U.S. policy to dispense justice for their sins.”
The big promise with spheres of influence is the reduction, if not elimination, of the risk of world war. As great powers carve up the world, limit their defined interests, and respect one another’s backyards, they have less disputes and less reasons to engage in conflict. Or so goes the claim.
This promise should not be dismissed lightly. In our nuclear and hypersonic age, great-power wars count as among the existential threats to humankind. We are in a world more dangerous than the later phases of the Cold War in many respects. The last few years have seen growing risks of a direct Russia-NATO clash in Ukraine and a deterioration of security relations with China over Taiwan and the South China Sea, not to mention great power-magnified tensions in the Sahel and the Middle East. Arms control hangs by a thread, and the decline of unipolarity has Washington anxious. If spheres of influence dramatically reduce chances of a world war, that can only be a good thing.
But in the final analysis, spheres of influence cannot be the solution in our times. Washington’s conceptualization of its own sphere is too expansive and will not be acceptable to China; in an interconnected world, geographic partitioning is extremely challenging; and the global south is not what it once was and could resist such a configuration in direct and indirect ways.
