Part I: The Dishonesty of Washington’s Sphere of Influence Debate

A hypocrisy at the core of debates about a global order predicated on “spheres of influence."

I was way out in front of the sphere-of-influence discourse.

Back in the spring of 2016, I sat on the patio of the Moana Surfrider in Honolulu, before the hotel staff even set out the towels and lounge chairs, pecking away on my laptop. It was quiet enough to actually hear the baby waves lapping, which, in the bustle of Waikiki tourism, gets drowned out once the haole have had their coffee.

I had been reading work by some of the old-school geopoliticians—imperialists—but was unsure what to do with it. I found it dense and less insightful than my Pentagon peers did. It was also tinged with a casual racism that bothered me. “Civilizational” thinking was in keeping with the early 20th century times, of course, but I found it hard to separate the ideas of someone like Alfred Thayer Mahan from the imperialist purposes forthrightly motivating them.

But on that morning, I happened to be combing through some speeches by both Obama and then-Vice President Biden. Each had decried “spheres of influence” as a musty relic of the past, a critique meant to vindicate the Obama-era brand of primacy, which draped itself in liberal internationalist rhetoric. Their rejection of spheres of influence doubled as a jab against Russia, who, in 2014, orchestrated the secession of the Donbas region of Ukraine—an assertion of a Russian sphere of influence in a globalized world where, paradoxically, national borders were supposedly sacrosanct.

Something in my mind clicked into place as I sensed a hypocrisy: What about the Monroe Doctrine? What about Puerto Rico? What about Guam and Micronesia? It was one thing to say that America’s sovereign allies were not part of a US sphere of influence; it was another thing to deny actually existing colonial relations.

That morning, I went on writing for several hours.