Spheres of influence are back (whether US policymakers accept it or not)

Until quite recently, the concept of spheres of influence seemed to have been consigned to the dustbin of history. Up to the end of the Cold War, of course, such zones had been an unexceptional feature of the modern international system. Great power routinely staked out geographic zones within which they limited the autonomy of weaker states — often as buffer zones between themselves and potential adversaries or rival empires. But with the advent of the so-called “unipolar moment” in the early 1990s, such geopolitical contrivances came to be deemed passé, relics of a benighted past that had no place in the brave new “liberal international order” of the 21st century. Spheres of influence, or so it seemed, had been consigned to the dustbin of history.

But this has not proven to be the case. The unipolar moment has passed, the liberal international order is dead or dying and the 21st century is starting to look a lot more like the 19th (or 18th or 17th) than the new millennium promised by the “end-of-history” crowd in the 1990s. And as all this has happened – as the transition from the historically aberrant post-Cold War era to a more normal era of great power competition has unfolded – states have once again started to carve out spheres of influence. Motivated by a combination of insecurity, dissatisfaction with the vestigial liberal international order and desire for status – and emboldened by the contraction of the United States’s own once-global sphere of influence – great powers are once again seeking to dominate their own geopolitical neighborhoods.

In the Russian case, this has taken the form of efforts to institutionalize its dominance of the former Soviet space through Moscow-led organizations such as the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU) and the Collective Security Treaty organization (CSTO). It has also taken the form of efforts over the last decade to limit Ukraine’s freedom to decide its own foreign policy, most notably by seeking to intimidate Kyiv into abandoning all hope of joining Western clubs such as the European Union or NATO.

Similarly, Iran, though smaller in size and in economic and military power than Russia, is hard at work carving out its own sphere influence. Despite, or perhaps because of, U.S.-led efforts to contain it, the Tehran regime has continued to try to assert its regional dominance, both directly and via its vast network of proxy Shiite militias.

And then there’s China, which is striving to attain undisputed control over the islands in the South and East China Seas, to dominate its neighbors in Southeast Asia and to exclude the United States from much of the Western Pacific. Through the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), Beijing is also seeking to build out its sphere of influence to include regions as distant from China as the Middle East and Latin America. 

Even India has begun carving out a sphere of influence, taking concrete steps to dominate the Indian Ocean region and to challenge China for predominance in Southeast Asia. 

Now, one might expect that clear-eyed practitioners of realpolitik in Washington would look at the new realities of great power competition and accept, however grudgingly, that spheres of influence are back. But this too has proven not to be the case.

The U.S. foreign policy establishment continues to view the very idea of spheres of influence – other than its own, of course – as a dangerous atavism that must not be allowed a second act. The return to a world of spheres of influence, or so the argument runs, would mark the definitive end of the quarter-century-long unipolar moment and the liberal international order that it spawned. It would, in effect, mark the end of the long march toward the sunlit uplands of an American-led utopia of peace, justice, prosperity and freedom. And, finally, it would drive home once and for all the fact that that the era of American primacy is over — that the days when Washington got to write and enforce the rules of the game had finally passed.

As none of these developments are palatable to those who cling to the now-anachronistic idea that this is still a unipolar world dominated by the United States, they simply reject the underlying idea out of hand. Spheres of influence are so bad that their return is not only unacceptable but unthinkable. And those who would seek to revive them – whether Chinese, Russian, Iranian, Turkish, Indian or other – must be up to no good and therefore will have to be stopped. 

But geopolitical facts are stubborn things. For a relatively short period of time, the objective conditions of international politics were such that spheres of influence entered a period of dormancy. But those conditions have vanished, and that period of dormancy is over. Spheres of influence are back, and sooner or later U.S. policymakers are simply going to have to accept this reality and deal with it. Let’s hope it’s sooner rather than later.

Andrew Latham is a professor of international relations at Macalester College in Saint Paul, Minnesot,a and a non-resident fellow at Defense Priorities in Washington, D.C. Follow him on Twitter @aalatham.