President Donald Trump’s renewed emphasis on dividing the international system into spheres of influence represents an overdue recognition of geopolitical reality over ideological fantasy. For decades, American foreign policy has been imprisoned by the illusion that the post-Cold War “unipolar moment” would last forever—that Washington could reshape the world in its image through democracy promotion, humanitarian interventions, and ever-expanding security commitments.
Trump’s approach, whatever its rhetorical excesses, acknowledges what every serious student of international relations understands: Great powers have legitimate security interests in their near abroad, and attempting to deny this reality produces conflict rather than preventing it.
The bipartisan foreign policy establishment clings to the notion that America must maintain primacy everywhere, all the time. This maximalist vision has produced a series of costly failures ranging from Iraq, to Libya, to the futile attempt to integrate Ukraine into NATO’s orbit—an effort which contributed to the current catastrophe. The spheres of influence framework offers an alternative: recognizing that Russia has interests in Eastern Europe, that China has interests in East Asia, and yes, that America has interests in the Western Hemisphere.
This is not appeasement, but prudence. It’s the difference between George Kennan’s containment of the Soviet Union and the neoconservatives’ project of global transformation. The Monroe Doctrine, after all, was itself a sphere of influence claim—one that served American security for generations.
Critics will immediately point to Ukraine, claiming that acknowledging spheres of influence means abandoning democracies to their autocratic neighbors. This misunderstands both the concept and the stakes. Spheres of influence don’t eliminate sovereignty, they serve as a recognition that geography matters and that great powers will act to prevent hostile military alliances on their borders. Would America tolerate Chinese military bases in Mexico? The question answers itself.
The tragedy of Ukraine stems partly from the West’s refusal to acknowledge this reality. Promising NATO membership without the means or will to defend it created the worst of both worlds—provocation without deterrence. A spheres of influence framework would have meant negotiating Ukrainian neutrality, potentially avoiding the current bloodshed while preserving Ukrainian independence in ways that matter most to Ukrainians themselves.
In Asia, the spheres concept could provide the basis for stable competition with China. Beijing will dominate its near seas; pretending otherwise is fantasy. But dominance in the South China Sea need not mean Chinese hegemony over Japan, South Korea, or the broader Pacific. A spheres framework allows for negotiated understandings about where core interests lie and where accommodation is possible.
The alternative—treating every Chinese action as a prelude to global conquest—locks us into a confrontation that serves neither side’s interests and risks catastrophic miscalculation.
Trump’s instincts, however imperfectly articulated, align with a venerable realist tradition from George Washington’s Farewell Address through the founding of the Concert of Europe in the 19th Century to Nixon’s opening to China. These weren’t exercises in cynicism but in sustainable statecraft. The statesmen behind them recognized that international order requires accepting the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.
The liberal internationalist project promised perpetual peace and required perpetual intervention to try achieving it. It delivered neither peace nor democracy, but exhausted American power and credibility. The spheres of influence approach offers something more modest but more achievable: a world of managed competition among great powers, each secure in its core interests, each restrained from unlimited ambitions.
None of this is without difficulty. Defining spheres is contentious. Smaller nations fear abandonment. Larger nations can abuse the concept. And America’s allies in Europe and Asia will need reassurance that the U.S. accepting a spheres of influence framework doesn’t mean American withdrawal from commitments that genuinely matter.
But these are problems to be managed, not reasons to reject the framework entirely. The current alternative—pretending geography doesn’t matter, that NATO can expand indefinitely, that America can police every border and guarantee every nation—has manifestly failed.
Trump’s sphere of influence thinking, stripped of its bombast, points toward a more sustainable international order: one where American power focuses on core interests rather than dissipating in peripheral conflicts, where diplomacy acknowledges the security concerns of other great powers rather than dismissing them as illegitimate, and where the goal is stability among major powers, rather than the transformation of the international system.
This won’t satisfy those who believe American foreign policy should be an exercise in ideological crusading. But it might produce what decades of liberal hegemony have failed to deliver: an international order that doesn’t require endless American intervention to sustain, and that reduces rather than multiplies the risk of great power war.
The question isn’t whether spheres of influence exist—they always have. The question is whether we acknowledge them and manage them sensibly, or continue denying reality until it imposes itself catastrophically upon us. Trump, for all his flaws, at least asks the right question.
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