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The Disharmony of the Spheres the U.S The Disharmony of the Spheres The U.S. will endanger itself if it accedes to Russian and Chinese efforts to change the international system to their liking By Hal Brands and Charles Edel AKING THE STAGE at Westmin- A “sphere of influence” is traditionally under- ster College in March 1946, Win- stood as a geographical zone within which the most ston Churchill told his audience he powerful actor can impose its will. And nearly three “felt bound to portray the shadow decades after the close of the superpower struggle which…falls upon the world.” The that Churchill’s speech heralded, spheres of influence former British prime minister fa- are back. At both ends of the Eurasian landmass, the mously declared that “from Stettin authoritarian regimes in China and Russia are carv- in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain ing out areas of privileged influence—geographic hasT descended across the Continent.” He went on to ex- buffer zones in which they exercise diplomatic, eco- plain that “Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, nomic, and military primacy. China and Russia are Belgrade, Bucharest, and Sofia all…lie in what I must seeking to coerce and overawe their neighbors. They call the Soviet sphere.” Though the Westminster ad- are endeavoring to weaken the international rules dress is best remembered for the phrase “iron curtain,” and norms—and the influence of opposing powers— the way it called attention to an emerging Soviet sphere that stand athwart their ambitions in their respective of influence is far more relevant to today’s world. “near abroads.” Chinese island-building and maritime expansionism in the South China Sea and Russian Hal Brands teaches at Johns Hopkins–SAIS and is aggression in Ukraine and intimidation of the Baltic the author of American Grand Strategy in the Age of states are part and parcel of the quasi-imperial proj- Trump. Charles Edel serves as senior fellow and ects these revisionist regional powers are now pursu- visiting scholar at the U.S. Studies Centre at the Uni- ing. versity of Sydney and is the author of Nation Builder: Historically speaking, a world made up of ri- John Quincy Adams and the Grand Strategy of the val spheres is more the norm than the exception. Yet Republic. such a world is in sharp tension with many of the key 20 January 2018 For more than two centuries, American leaders have opposed the idea of a world divided into rival spheres of influence and have worked hard to deny other powers their own. tenets of the American foreign-policy tradition—and fluence game. From the early-19th century onward, with the international order that the United States American officials strove for preeminence in the West- has labored to construct and maintain since the end ern Hemisphere—first by running other European of World War II. powers off much of the North American continent and To be sure, Washington carved out its own then by pushing them out of Latin America. With the spheres of influence in the Western Hemisphere be- Monroe Doctrine, first enunciated in 1823, America ginning in the 19th century, and America’s myriad staked its claim to geopolitical primacy from Canada alliance blocs in key overseas regions are effectively to the Southern Cone. Over the succeeding genera- spheres by another name. And today, some interna- tions, Washington worked to achieve military domi- tional-relations observers have welcomed the return nance in that area, to tie the countries of the Western of what the foreign-policy analyst Michael Lind has Hemisphere to America geopolitically and economi- recently called “blocpolitik,” hoping that it might lead cally, and even to help pick the rulers of countries from to a more peaceful age of multilateral equilibrium. Mexico to Brazil. But for more than two centuries, American lead- If this wasn’t a sphere of influence, nothing was. ers have generally opposed the idea of a world divided In 1895, Secretary of State Richard Olney declared that into rival spheres of influence and have worked hard “the United States is practically sovereign on this con- to deny other powers their own. And a reversion to a tinent and its fiat is law upon the subjects to which it world dominated by great powers and their spheres of confines its interposition.” After World War II, more- influence would thus undo some of the strongest tra- over, a globally predominant United States steadily ex- ditions in American foreign policy and take the inter- panded its influence into Europe through NATO, into national system back to a darker, more dangerous era. East Asia through various military alliances, and into the Middle East through a web of defense, diplomatic, N AN EXTREME FORM, a sphere of influence can and political arrangements. The story of global poli- take the shape of direct imperial or colonial con- tics over the past 200 years has, in large part, been the I trol. Yet there are also versions in which a leading story of expanding U.S. influence. power forgoes direct military or administrative domi- Nonetheless, there has always been something nation of its neighbors but nonetheless exerts geopo- ambivalent—critics would say hypocritical—about litical, economic, and ideological influence. Whatever American views of this matter. For as energetic as their form, spheres of influence reflect two dominant Washington has been in constructing its geopolitical imperatives of great-power politics in an anarchic domain, a “spheres-of-influence world” is in perpetual world: the need for security vis-à-vis rival powers and tension with four strong intellectual traditions in U.S. the desire to shape a nation’s immediate environment strategy. These are hegemony, liberty, openness, and to its benefit. Indeed, great powers have throughout exceptionalism. history pursued spheres of influence to provide a buf- First, hegemony. The myth of America as an in- fer against the encroachment of other hostile actors nocent isolationist country during its first 170 years is and to foster the conditions conducive to their own powerful and enduring; it’s also wrong. From the out- security and well-being. set, American statesmen understood that the country’s The Persian Empire, Athens and Sparta, and favorable geography, expanding population, and envi- Rome all carved out domains of dominance. The Chi- able resource endowments gave it the potential to ri- nese tribute system—which combined geopolitical val, and ultimately overtake, the European states that control with the spread of Chinese norms and ideas— dominated world politics. America might be a fledg- profoundly shaped the trajectory of East Asia for ling republic, George Washington said, but it would hundreds of years. The 19th and 20th centuries saw one day attain “the strength of a giant.” From the revo- the British Empire, Japan’s East Asian Co-Prosperity lution onward, American officials worried, with good Sphere, and the Soviet bloc. reason, that France, Spain, and the United Kingdom America, too, has played the spheres-of-in- would use their North American territories to strangle Commentary 21 The United States has repeatedly acted on the belief that it could be neither as secure nor influential as it desired in a world divided up and dominated by rival nations. or contain the young republic. Much of early Ameri- that America’s liberal ideology was “destined to cover can diplomacy was therefore geared toward depriving the surface of the globe.” Here, too, the new nation was the European powers of their North American pos- not cursed with excessive modesty—and here, too, the sessions, using measures from coercive diplomacy to existence of rival spheres of influence threatened this outright wars of conquest. “The world shall have to be ambition. familiarized with the idea of considering our proper Rival spheres of influence—particularly within dominion to be the continent of North America,” wrote the Western Hemisphere—imperiled the survival of John Quincy Adams in 1819. The only regional sphere liberty at home. If the United States were merely one of influence that Americans would accept as legitimate great power among many on the North American con- was their own. tinent, the founding generation worried, it would be By the late-19th century, the same consider- forced to maintain a large standing military estab- ations were pushing Americans to target spheres of lishment and erect a sort of 18th-century “garrison influence further abroad. As the industrial revolu- state.” Living in perpetual conflict and vigilance, in tion progressed, it became clear that geography alone turn, would corrode the very freedoms for which the might not protect the nation. Aggressive powers could revolution had been fought. “No nation,” wrote James now generate sufficient military strength to domi- Madison, “can preserve its freedom in the midst of nate large swaths of Europe or East Asia and then continual warfare.” Just as Madison argued, in Federal- harness the accumulated resources to threaten the ist No. 10, that “extending the sphere”—expanding the United States. Moreover, as America itself became an republic—was a way of safeguarding republicanism at increasingly mighty country that sought to project home, expanding America’s geopolitical domain was its influence overseas, its leaders naturally objected essential to providing the external security that a lib- to its rivals’ efforts to establish their own preserves eral polity required to survive. from which Washington would be excluded. If much Rival spheres of influence also constrained the of America’s 19th-century diplomacy was dedicated prospects for liberty abroad. Although the question to denying other powers spheres of influence in the of whether the United States should actively support Western Hemisphere, much of the country’s 20th-cen- democratic revolutions overseas has been a source of tury diplomacy was an effort to break up or deny rival unending controversy, virtually all American strate- spheres of influence in Europe and East Asia.
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