by Bill Murray
An era of worldwide illiberal governance approaches. If the Trump administration has its way, future illiberal leaders will face fewer opponents. Aspiring autocrats will lose the constraint of the United States as a potential opponent. Autocracy will spread.
We speculated for years about how the unipolar moment would end. With the rise of China, would the United States fall into a Thucydides Trap? Would it stretch itself too thin? Would we fall victim to “imperial overstretch?”
How would the United States handle the rise of the rest? The debate was usually about what the US would do to keep things steady – to maintain equilibrium. No one saw the US as the disruptor. But as it turns out, it’s the chief enforcer who is changing the script.
The US is not riding the crest of some mass upwelling of worldwide ‘illiberal’ spirit. In leading the world toward a ‘spheres of influence’ (SOI) model, the Trump administration is making a considered choice, and it is tragic. Spheres of influence is a terrible idea for the United States.
It will squander the accumulated work of eighty years of American statecraft for no strategic gain. It will take down a framework that has on balance benefitted millions since World War II. *
Abandoning the rules-based international order would be a ham-fisted, unforced mistake. It would affirm the authoritarian models of the two other powers with whom the Trump administration proposes to split the world, and they wouldn’t even need to ask.
SOIs violate a principle which has stood (with obvious exceptions) since the mid-17th century. Rising from a series of agreements collectively known as the Peace of Westphalia (which ended the Thirty Years’ War), they codified the sovereignty of individual states and sought to tell meddling would-be hegemons to stop it and respect sovereign borders.
In such a rules-based order, disputes go to courts or councils or arbitrators; in a system of spheres of influence, they’re resolved over the phone from the hegemon’s villa – in this case from the Zhongnanhai leadership compound beside the Forbidden City in Beijing, from the presidential villa at Valdai north of Moscow or from Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
A rules-based system operates via precedent; SOIs begin and end at the whims of each new hegemon. SOIs make it harder for middle powers to ally with others in a way that might challenge the hegemon. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had this in mind in his headline-grabbing speech at Davos.
If SOIs take root, instability will increase around every sphere’s borders. Unfortunate states where the emperor is far away will become flashpoints in constant tests of resolve between blocs. We can see all that coming.
It’s extraordinary that the US appears willing even to consider the idea of spheres of influence in the first place. I think it’s important to try to figure out why.
Since the Second World War the United States has maintained a system of worldwide alliances. For its part, the US offers allies benefits like international institutions for conflict resolution, secure shipping lanes for worldwide trade and maintenance of the world’s reserve currency which, up to now, has offered governments US treasuries as a nearly risk-free investment vehicle.
In return, the US realizes a host of real benefits – what economists have called exorbitant privilege: world trade in the dollar allows Washington to finance its deficits at lower interest rates, and cushions the US economy (in crises, even of the US’s own making, capital tends to flee into dollars).
It’s a system that for eighty years has provided the US “open access to overseas resources, markets, and strategic bases.” There is no guarantee that a future system of spheres of influence will be so beneficial.
Through varied institutions and agreements, and by foreswearing rule by fiat, what the US has done is to consciously constrain its own freedom of action. It has judged this beneficial in return for cultivating a wide set of allies. In this way it is intentionally accepting certain limits on its sovereignty.
It’s too facile to conclude that the US came up with a fully formed theory of a “rules-based international order” right from the start. Rather, I expect American leadership was more intent on not repeating a mistake. At the end of the first World War, Europe was shattered. The US retreated and watched the continent return to war two decades later.
After World War II, Europe was shattered again. This time the Americans bought into the idea of a French civil servant named Jean Monnet, who proposed binding Germany and France together into the European Iron and Steel Community, a forerunner to today’s EU.
The Truman administration supported the Iron and Steel Community as a way of anchoring West Germany in a Western facing organization (that is, away from the Soviet Union). Then the US committed itself to European reconstruction via the Marshall Plan.
The US and its allies went on to set up the United Nations, to (theoretically, at least) share tasks like foreign aid and peacekeeping with allies and opponents alike. And at a moment when he might have been sorely tempted to rule by decree, President Truman instead bound the US to a mutual defense organization called NATO.
The US didn’t blunder into the postwar order through naïve idealism. It arrived there after trial and error through a deliberate, interest-driven process, in which the US has chosen to trade freedom of action for durable power.
The system that emerged has come to be known as the rules-based international order. The Trump administration is applying pressure to end that system, and it is important to resist that pressure.
There’s a basic tactic of persuasion: tell an audience what you’re going to say, say it, and then tell them what you said. The people who built the rules-based order have failed at this – at explaining why sharing sovereignty on some issues is preferable to a system of spheres of influence.
They became fluent in the language of institutions – in treaties and regimes, rules and frameworks, but to the public, sometimes the new order came to sound like giving power away. And now comes the Trump administration, keen to operate without restraint, apparently willing to tear down the rules-based order.
This administration scoffs at the idea of its power being mediated by institutions. It looks bent on releasing the United States from constraints on its sovereignty in favor of dividing the world into spheres of influence built around the great military powers.
Under the plan talked about most, the US would have dominion over the western hemisphere, Russia over Eurasia and China over east Asia. But why might a leader be misled into accepting the siren call of SOIs? Let’s look at two possibilities.
One is the lure of dominating one’s own sphere. In doing so a power could reject any foreign system of values it opposed. Put concretely, as the dominant government in its SOI, the US could impose its own values on its sphere. Here the MAGA purists find a natural ally in the growing Christian Nationalist movement.
For Christian Nationalists, the appeal of exercising power directly is not only theological – it is that – but jurisdictional, too. It promises a moral and cultural domain in which values need not be negotiated with rival systems, but can be asserted from the top.
Anti-‘woke’ crusades brought MAGA and the Christian Nationalist movement together in the 2024 campaign. The Trump campaign recognized energized, activist evangelical voters as voters it had to have.
With the promise of dominating their own sphere of influence, MAGA purists could offer Christian Nationalist voters a defined, predominantly Christian space, a safe zone with no need to compromise with rival value systems. And since nothing says the dominant state must stop there, the path could be open to the export of evangelical cultural norms.
Christian Nationalism roots legitimacy in tradition, faith and hierarchy. It’s a far cry from (as Christian Nationalists might see it) rootless, never-ending negotiations over the ‘woke’ rules-based international order. And it dovetails nicely with Donald Trump’s instinct that power should be personal, imposed by fiat and without outside constraint.
Donald Trump was an unlikely torchbearer for Christian Nationalism, as his “Two Corinthians” episode showed. But he intuited that Christian Nationalists were less concerned with personal piety and, like proponents of Brexit (which we’ll consider next), more intent on reclaiming authority over culture and education and punishment.
Trump couldn’t quote scripture, but he could talk the language of grievance and law and order, about the opposition he shared with the Christian right to pluralism and to institutions that claim the right to overrule local moral authority. He promised that he would be their retribution.
The same impulse – a desire to bring power back into a defined space where it can be exercised directly and without appeal – played out across Britain in 2016. Framed as a revolt against “Brussels,” the Brexit referendum was the same kind of attempt – to snatch authority from a system of procedures and rules and bring it back to communities, where it could be wielded directly and without appeal.
Brexit is a clear case study of a country constraining its own freedom of action abroad. Its proponents sought to ‘take back control’ of sovereignty they felt the United Kingdom had lost to the European Union. But in the end Britain lost its place at the table, and its chance to shape EU policy to its own advantage.
Brexiteers wouldn’t call loss of agency in EU trade policy ‘constraining freedom.’ I think Brexiteers sought to trade the more diffuse power to act alongside European equals in a larger space, for the domestic ability, in a smaller space, to apply power concretely. They were willing to trade influence in the EU for unconstrained agency in the UK.
Brexit stood in for a host of grievances: anxiety over immigrants crossing the Channel, the neglect of the British regions, concern for the wobbling National Health Service and a general distrust of elites. Then-Justice Secretary Michael Gove even told Sky News that “people in this country have had enough of experts.”
UK voters opted for what felt like more tangible, hands-on control. And the same may be happening in Donald Trump’s America.
But Donald Trump should be careful what he wishes for. If spheres of influence are his wish, it would pay to first consider what that really means. Europe would escape the pincer in which it now finds itself between the US and Russia, but it would wake up to a Russia determined to be the dominant player in its sphere, and every geography teacher with a chalkboard would then explain Russia’s geographic sphere of interest across the northern European plain, where, among others, the Baltic states live.
Poland would again find itself between Russia and Germany. Hungary, Czechia and Slovakia might seek protection from Moscow. Ideologues in Serbia would likely bring the Balkans back to life. The high north might be radically militarized. And so on.
Open the lens further back to Asia. From Beijing’s point of view there’s Taiwan for a start, the entire first island chain and all of Southeast Asia, the South Korean Peninsula and Japan. Everybody in sight would want to arm up, and fast. At the end of the rush to a spheres of influence world, the planet could find itself bristling with nuclear weapons.
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Cynical columnists like to say that National Security Strategies, like the one the administration published in December, are a bureaucratic waste of time, written by committee and hardly worth ink on paper. The administration used its National Security Strategy to coin the term “flexible realism,” which seems to mean “make it up as you go along.” Whatever it means, it’s not Realism or Liberalism or Constructivism or any recognizable combination as understood in International Relations theory; it looks a lot like an unforced strategic retreat into the US’s own sphere.
If the United States confines its influence primarily to the western hemisphere, the outcome will be a huge shock to Americans, who have ridden so high for so long that, if they don’t think of their superpower status as birthright these days, it’s because they don’t think about it at all.
Americans will be taken aback at all the wild west out in the wider world. An SOI world will surely become a more violent place, as low-intensity conflicts spread farther than America’s will to chase them.
Post-World War II America’s international posture and political style were learned in a time of American prosperity, reflecting postwar abundance, a steep rise in domestic standard of living and the supreme confidence that comes from having engineered a system of governance that ruled the world for a time.
That system couldn’t hold up forever, and it didn’t. The lived experience of war has now faded. Cracks have formed and widened, leading to a 21st century of crises in war and terror, financial mismanagement and a pandemic.
When the Trump administration leaves the stage, it will hand off governance to a generation of leaders shaped not by physical and ideological wars, but by a quarter century of faltering systems and accumulating problems. The rise of autocracy that seems poised to accompany a spheres of influence model will be just one more challenge facing the generation set to inherit the already battered mantle of America’s fading dominance.
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* I acknowledge the well-known caveat that the US often falls short of its ideal, and that sometimes (as Mark Carney put it at Davos):
“the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”
All true and granted. There will also be opinions from critics of capitalism that the whole ‘world order’ is fundamentally extractive and exploitative in the first place. I only mean to argue here that for all its imperfection, the postwar rules-based international order has improved the standard of living for many more people around the world than it has hurt.
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ONE LAST THING: A hundred years ago the Marxist theorist Antonio Gramsci, an imprisoned member of the Italian parliament, had a moment of revelation. He wrote from his cell that “the old world is dying, and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum, a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”
Many of us have already had our Gramscian moment. (I wrote about it last March.) But it seems to have taken until the World Economic Forum meeting three weeks ago to convince the Masters of the Universe at Davos. Gramsci was all the rage as we began to get the Masters’ unnerved debriefs.
Still, it’s good to have the Masters on your side once in a while. They could be useful in what lies ahead.
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I write more like this at Common Sense and Whiskey on Substack.
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