We may be entering a different era in foreign policy — a world organized not by universal norms but by spheres of influence, where international law and custom increasingly give way to the interests of the strongest regional powers.
It is a system with obvious dangers.
Antitrust law rests on the premise that industries dominated by a few giants can become inefficient, unaccountable and hostile to competition. The same may hold for geopolitics. Too few dominant states place the freedom and self-determination of smaller nations at risk.
And the pushback against such an order may be coming from unlikely quarters.
It is easy to imagine the outlines of a world of spheres: the United States asserting primacy in the Western Hemisphere, Russia seeking deference in its former imperial space, and China demanding predominance in East Asia. Beneath them, regional powers — India, Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran among them — would pursue spheres of their own.
The trouble with spheres is that they overlap.
China’s conception of its neighborhood necessarily encounters Japan, India, Taiwan, Australia and other Pacific states. Russia’s conception of its security encounters Ukraine and Europe. Turkey, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Iran can hardly pursue regional influence without eventually encountering one another.
Drawing circles on maps is easier than persuading the people inside them to cooperate.
The traditional counterweight to such arrangements has been an international order built around alliances, institutions and rules. Canada, the European Union, the United Kingdom, Japan, Australia and others retain considerable economic and political power. But democratic coalitions move slowly. Governments change. Electorates disagree. Collective action requires persuasion.
A great power can decide what it wants.
An alliance has to agree.
What is striking is where some of the most consequential resistance is actually occurring.
Today it is occurring in Ukraine and Iran.
Ukraine has spent more than four years resisting a vastly larger Russia, which still has not achieved some of its central territorial objectives. Iran, confronted by the military power of the United States and Israel, has likewise proved considerably more difficult to subdue than superior military strength might have suggested. Both conflicts continue, at extraordinary cost, because the weaker state has refused to accept the outcome that greater power was expected to produce.
Smaller powers are refusing to accept that military superiority alone gives larger ones the right to determine their future.
And that resistance matters beyond the countries themselves.
Once great powers acquire an accepted right to determine the governments, borders or foreign alignments of weaker states, the principle does not remain confined to one region. Other powers notice. So do smaller countries.
Spheres of influence have a way of becoming precedents.
A world of spheres nevertheless has an appealing simplicity. Great powers establish order in their neighborhoods. Smaller countries accommodate themselves to reality. Conflict between the giants might even diminish if everyone learns where the boundaries lie.
There is an elegance to it.
There is also a problem.
The countries inside the spheres have interests of their own.
Ukraine was expected to accommodate Russian power. Iran was expected to yield to overwhelming military superiority of Israel and the US. Neither has behaved as expected. Whatever conclusions history eventually reaches about these conflicts, their resistance has already demonstrated the difficulty of constructing an international order around the assumption that weaker countries will accept arrangements stronger countries make for them.
Perhaps that is the fundamental problem with spheres of influence.
The great powers can draw the circles.
The countries inside them get a vote too.