Part II: The Dishonesty of Washington’s Sphere of Influence Debate
Hypocrisy at the core of debates about a global order predicated on “spheres of influence."
Spheres of influence are all the rage now. A piece in the New York Times is the latest—but hardly the first—claiming that what Trump and Vance seek is a world carved up into great-power spheres of influence. In its telling, the Western Hemisphere is for the US, Asia is for China, and Europe is for Russia.
This portrait is very stylized; not entirely accurate to the MAGA vision of foreign policy. But not totally wrong either.
In Part I of this post, I started to explain that, prior to Trump 1.0, talk about “spheres of influence” had political connotations different from today.
During the Obama years, liberal internationalists committed to US primacy found it easy to demagogue about why spheres of influence were antithetical to modern international relations. As hierarchical diplomatic practices of control and exclusion, spheres of influence were associated with other great powers—namely Russia and China. Being for a “rules-based order” or American primacy meant being against any other powers cultivating spheres of their own.
That was then. Now, some foreign-policy restrainers think sphere of influence will save the world from security dilemmas and American predation. Neocons hate spheres because they believe they will sacrifice US hegemony. Still others worry spheres of influence will lead us down the primrose path to war despite best intentions. And as I documented in Grand Strategies of the Left, progressives remain divided on the merits of spheres of influence.
There are two grand problems here.
One is that these debates, which are all hot right now, only matter because MAGA embraces sphere-of-influence reasoning; it is the only serious concept in Trump’s foreign policy. Everything else in US statecraft now is either racist or militarist. At least spheres of influence have some kind of intellectual pedigree (albeit of imperialist provenance).
But opposing spheres of influence is a way for DC types to oppose Trump on the grounds that spheres of influence are just tantamount to might-makes-right; any semblance of an international order based on global rules goes out the window. And the pretension to putting US power in service of global rules is what justifies the national security state’s by-any-means-necessary pursuit of primacy in a world where that is no longer possible.
And that’s the second problem—grand hypocrisy, the kind that makes it impossible to rationally weight the costs and benefits of US actions. In 2025, as in decades prior, Washington debates about spheres of influence lack any recognition that the United States maintains formal (eg, one-third of the Pacific Islands region) and informal (eg, Iraq) spheres of influence. Because Washingtonians don’t acknowledge this, they can’t attribute the deep insecurity of the Blue Pacific—including untold amounts of structural violence—to the way that the US has carved up the region and perpetuated a sovereignty deficit there. They cannot comprehend that its need to control the Pacific has everything to do with denying the region autonomy.
There is also no sense that US hegemony itself could be understood as a global-scale sphere of influence.
In reclaiming the Monroe Doctrine, in prioritizing the Western Hemisphere as its sphere of influence, the Trump administration is abandoning obligations to maintaining order in other regions. But as I explained in Pacific Power Paradox, the US hasn’t been great at maintaining international order and its military presence is a leading source of global insecurity. The US has been a chaos muppet as often as it’s been a source of stability in places like East Asia.
Worse, under Trump, the US will still insist on military and economic primacy. It still intends to maintain the extensive, exclusive US sphere of influence in the Blue Pacific region. And it will send troops, bombs, and extractive companies to any part of the world that has critical minerals or unlucky positioning in global supply chains.
But we should be wary of those who would equate deal-making among great powers with imperialism. Diplomacy per se does not constitute a sphere of influence. Deal-making for exclusionary control of a third territory does.