Analysis of Donald Trump and American world power still suffers from conceptual confusion
Periods of international tumult, like the present, need careful analysis. Solutions are no good, obviously, if one wrongly defines the problem. And in turn, careful analysis demands precision with one’s terminology. President Donald Trump’s tumultuous second term has not universally received such care. This is partly attributable to the wildness of the man himself and his volatile behaviour. It is also due to a conceptual confusion, born of a want of care amongst the commentariat. One widespread concept, thrown around like confetti, requires an intervention. This is the term “spheres of influence.”
As they do with the word “isolationist”, observers of Trump’s behaviour wield the term “spheres of influence” with little preparation, blithely summarising his statecraft as one large effort to carve up the world between Washington, Beijing and Moscow. Such a suggestion ought to be a serious one, based upon dispassionate scrutiny of mounting evidence. However, too often those applying the label do so as though it were axiomatically true. It is not.
In fact, the evidence of Trump’s first year back in the White House suggests the contrary. The United States under his aegis is not yet pursuing such an approach to the world. And there is counter-evidence — from Trump’s deeds and the declaratory words of his National Security Strategy — that this very different regime still craves dominance in key theatres, only on its low-commitment, at times extortionate, at times contradictory terms.
Firstly, any suggestion of a spheres arrangement in the Middle East is not even wrong. The largest local state with its historical ambitions to primacy is Iran. Trump is simply not entertaining any suggestion that anyone concedes a sphere to Tehran. So that’s one theatre where the concept collapses at first contact.
In the rest of Eurasia, one of the most significant moves of the new administration has been to level punitive economic sanctions against India, and secondary sanctions likewise on other states, expressly to coerce it for its consumption of Russian oil, gas and raw materials. This programme of economic warfare is part of Trump’s effort to broker a settlement in Ukraine, partly by pressuring Russia to bargain more flexibly. And again, on Trump’s watch and with his permission, the CIA has helped Ukraine launch damaging and precise attacks on Russia’s oil facilities on its own soil. This policy of checking Vladimir Putin’s expansionism can be lauded or criticised and described in various ways. It is emphatically not a sign that the U.S. is offering Russia a free hand in its “near abroad.”
That Trump’s government also wants Europe to take the lead in its own defence, and says so explicitly, is momentous. A major, accelerated burden shift to allies that the MAGA movement despises is one of the most significant shifts in U.S. policy in our time. But it does not amount to the policy mix that “spheres of influence” implies. Russia needs some containment. It is also, in the “America First” view, a secondary theatre, and relatively wealthy allies should take most of the load in doing the containing. That is not the same thing as turning over Eastern Europe to Russia and leaving the region to the gods.
Hold the following three separate concepts together. Firstly, there often are objectively and functionally geographical and political spheres in the world, whether we like it or not. It is not pleasing to those who want the world to be a liberal, lawful, egalitarian community of sovereign states freely choosing their own associations or alliances, but the fact of life is, and always has been, that the strongest states usually demand prerogatives and privileges in their own regions, and are jealous of interlopers and competitors.
The United States has a rich history of simultaneously denouncing the old world Realpolitik of spheres, while asserting its own
Even in the era of intercontinental missiles or cyber hacking, physical proximity still confers advantages and it still impresses, and scares, the powerful. And great powers, who are mostly rational but not always reasonable, will demand their own sphere even while encroaching on others’. China projects power far and wide in Asia, often coercively, but rails against the coming of meddling America. It invaded Korea in 1950 precisely to drive away Douglas MacArthur’s approaching army and to push back a potential predator from its throat. The map is clarifying.
For its part, the United States has a rich history of simultaneously denouncing the old world Realpolitik of spheres, while asserting its own. Donald Trump’s strike on Caracas effectively revived not the Monroe Doctrine, which was and is a zone of exclusion in America’s western hemisphere, but the Roosevelt Corollary, claiming licence to intervene at will. Trump acts out brazenly and in particularly gangsterish style the principle that earlier presidencies never relinquished, only more politely. Asked about the hypothetical scenario of Russia stationing forces in Cuba or Venezuela, President Joe Biden’s very non-Trumpian National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan replied that the U.S. would move decisively to block it. Constraining smaller states from their sovereign decision to host foreign forces 000 or in 1962, missiles — is understandable, but most certainly a spherical act. Regional hegemony for me, but not for thee. Such is life.
Secondly, there is a difference between asserting one’s own sphere and offering other great powers the same privilege in a mutual toleration agreement, as some propose. There can be bargains to that effect, to varying degrees of flexibility and domination. The Concert of Europe laid down from 1815 rested partly on recognised “zones” of influence, though the players did not always honour that principle. The Yalta agreement of 1945 also conceded Joseph Stalin’s Soviet Union a zone, even as President Franklin Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill tried in vain to get Moscow to ensure free elections. And spheres can be predatory agreements towards third, weaker parties: China still bitterly recalls the explicit carve-up agreement inflicted on itself by colonising European powers, while the Berlin West Africa conference of 1884-5 put a whole continent on the menu. This is an ancient tendency. In the secret Pact of the Kings of 203/202 BC, the Seleucid and Macedonian rulers organised to devour the territories of imploding Ptolemaic Egypt.
Furthermore, there is again a difference between arranging to carve up the world by spheres, and reluctantly deciding not to try to roll back another’s sphere directly. When President Dwight Eisenhower in 1956 elected not to intervene directly in Budapest as the Soviet satellite regime crushed an uprising, it was effectively allowing for a Soviet regional veto. Yet in contrast to sphere-pacts, it never made an agreement that the Soviet Union should have a free hand in Eastern Europe as its domain. It always strived to undermine the Soviet sphere by more indirect and less risky means: economic and military competition, rhetorical offensives, and sponsoring dissidents.
Bringing it back to Trump, there is little sign a spheres pact is now underway or even on the table, including the region where it competes with a large, wealthy peer competitor. The latest National Security Strategy may have toned down its hostility to China in contrast with the declaratory offerings of the first Trump term. Still, it asserted its commitment to the status quo over Taiwan, the centrepiece of China’s attempt to achieve primacy in Asia, and of the effort to counter it. And Trump matches this baseline decision with deepened defence engagement, via increased bilateral and multilateral military exercises in the wider region. Congress has just passed the U.S. National Defense Authorization Act for 2026, fortifying various military commitments to Asia, and Trump did not veto it. It provides funding for shipbuilding, aircraft, munitions, and nuclear modernization. It restricts U.S. investments in tech-sensitive Chinese sectors, extends funding and support to Taiwan and the Philippines, mandates a minimum U.S. presence in South Korea, and hardens supply chains. These exertions are not geared primarily towards anti-piracy. And this information is available on open sources. That being so, the “spheres of influence” claim is just plain lazy.
This is not to deny that an American president, now or tomorrow, might try to reorganise policy around a global carve-up. Rather, it is to suggest that the abandonment of a deep commitment to heavy-lifting primacy in all key theatres, with the U.S. shouldering most of the burden everywhere, does not mean a lurch into isolation or sphere-pacts. It is one more area of debate where the primacists of the old school rig the rhetoric, to pose a false binary choice between “global leadership” on their terms, and isolation. As Trump graphically shows, dominance can take many forms.
