A New U.S. Grand Strategy: A Return to Spheres of Influence, With Sarang Shidore

LINDSAY:
Welcome to The President's Inbox, I'm Jim Lindsay, the Mary and David Boies distinguished senior fellow in U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. This week's topic is: "A Return to Spheres of Influence."

With me to discuss the concept of spheres of influence and their role in great power politics is Sarang Shidore. Sarang is director of the Global South Program at the Quincy Institute. He has written widely on the geopolitics of the Global South, on Asia, and on climate change, including for media outlets such as Foreign Affairs, Foreign Policy, and The New York Times. He's the author of the recent Foreign Policy essay, "Spheres of Influence are Not the Answer." Sarang, thank you very much for joining me on The President's Inbox.

SHIDORE:
Thank you for having me, Jim.

LINDSAY:
I have to say, Sarang, I read your piece in Foreign Policy and it really caught my attention and it made me realize that I have heard more about the concept or the term "spheres of influence" in the last several months than I have since I was in graduate school four decades ago. So, for those listeners who have never sat through a semester-long course on theories of international relations, what exactly is a sphere of influence?

SHIDORE:
A sphere of influence is sort of a geographic space. So it's first of all defined by geography. Typically, it is a practice of great power. Certainly, in history, we have seen that. And typically, a great power, this is not just an action of a great power going off and doing it by itself, but rather an understanding between peer great powers to, let's say, quote-unquote, govern a space that neither of them directly have annexed or is not a space that is not formally a part of these great powers. So these are countries or historically kingdoms that were adjacent to or in some sense not very far from that great power. So the idea here is the word influence is a little misleading because influence sounds very sort of benign and you can get influence from different players, but here it's really a euphemism for domination. So what we are talking about is great powers having an implicit understanding, sometimes explicit in the 19th century, of saying, "Let's look at this continent of Africa and let's apportion it amongst ourselves." In those days, of course, it was more territorial control was also involved. But in many cases, there were also kingdoms that were retained as nominally sovereign, but were essentially dominated by one great power or the other. And that sort of a carve-up of the world among great powers is based on this sort of, "This is my backyard and that is yours and let's just agree to that. And if there's a friction, let's just manage it based on these principles broadly" is really what the concept is all about.

LINDSAY:
Am I correct in saying that we can sort of see the emergence of this idea of spheres of influence, of sort of carving up territory or establishing zones in which a country is expected to be able to wield its power, trace it back to, I don't know, the Congress of Vienna during the Napoleonic Wars, 1814, 1815?

SHIDORE:
Yes, I think the 19th century is a good example of that. And that's also sort of a example where somebody who may be studying essentially, Europe, would say, "Hey, they worked." Because Napoleonic Wars were very terrible, they devastated the continent. They were effectively, a World War of the time. And after that, the great powers which were basically European, the United States was still a very young republic, much weaker than it became later.

LINDSAY:
Well, in 1814, we were losing a war to Britain.

SHIDORE:
That's right. That's right. We were. So the U.S. was not a part of this conversation at the time, but the European powers got together in the Congress of Vienna and there were other such meetings and said, "Let us find a way to not have a World War, basically. And what we do is let's apportion the world, essentially." Outside of the Americas were lost more or less, but even in the Americas, actually, in Latin America there were these influence moves that were present that clashed between Britain and the United States, and that's when you get the Monroe Doctrine. So the U.S. asserted its own sphere in the Americas because it was a regional power, it was not a world—

LINDSAY:
Well, but at the time that President Monroe gave his Annual Message to Congress articulating what became the Monroe Doctrine, the United States had absolutely no ability to back that up, it was more a bluff.

SHIDORE:
Right. It was aspiration notional, but there was still a—

LINDSAY:
And we were actually counting on Great Britain to carry it out for us if need be, but I don't want to go down that historical rabbit hole.

SHIDORE:
Yeah. Yeah, sure. So what happens between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the whole century thereafter, more or less is that broadly you have peace in Europe. You do have the Crimean War and there are frictions and clashes, but nothing resembling what happened in the early part of the century. So in a sense, spheres of influence, quote-unquote, "worked" in Europe. Of course, there's another story to that.

LINDSAY:
What's the other story to it?

SHIDORE:
The other story is that the conflicts actually did not end in terms of how African peoples and peoples in Asia and so forth experienced them, because a lot of these arrangements were about domination of European countries over what we call today the Global South. And that essentially, was a period of high colonization. So what was good for Europeans broadly turned out not to be so good for Africans, for example.

LINDSAY:
So help me understand what the appeal is for the spheres of influence approach to world politics. Its selling point is that it limits conflict?

SHIDORE:
Yeah, that's the promise. And because again, like I said, in Europe, it did limit conflict for almost a hundred years, more or less. So a time when the United States as most observers agreed that the United States is no longer as powerful as it was in the 90s. So, we are seeing, I don't like to use the word multipolarity, I think that's too strong a word, but certainly, we are seeing a decline of unipolarity and possibly a interregnum between unipolarity and something else that we cannot yet define. And in that period, such periods of transition tend to be most dangerous, because you have a existing great power in decline, and there's often a rising great power, in this case China, but also Russia in terms of its assertion, if not its raw power. And you have then chances of great power war. And indeed, we are seeing that. In Ukraine, there are risks that remain despite the attempt to negotiate, of this thing escalating. The South China Sea is not going very well. And the United States and China are also engaged in tussles on all sorts of fronts. So the times are not very promising. And in this period when you could get a great power war, and today that means nuclear, if it escalates beyond a point.

LINDSAY:
The costs are obviously greater than they were during the 19th century.

SHIDORE:
Absolutely. They're existential.

LINDSAY:
On that score, Sarang, when we look at the 19th century, why did the spheres of influence approach to preserving the peace, at least in Europe, and I take your point that it did not mean peace in much of the rest of the world, it meant carving up the rest of the world, but why did the spheres of influence approach that's worked through most of the 19th century ultimately collapse?

SHIDORE:
Well, it collapsed for a number of—I mean, historians have debated this, and I think certainly, one reason was, and this most high school students of history would know is that spheres of influence were arranged between great powers of 1814 or thereabouts. And by the time you get to the early part of the 20th century, of course, the world is not static. So you had a new great power, or at least aspirant, rise, that is Germany. And the existing great powers were not willing to brook it, not willing to accommodate it. And Germany was insistent that it deserved this place at the high table and deserved its own colonies and so forth. So it started interfering actually, in places like Morocco and others in terms of trying to stake claim, nominally in favor of sovereignty of some of these places, but in effect, of course, trying to create its own sphere of influence. And that ran headlong into long-established powers such as France and Britain. And of course, the Russians as well were concerned. And what you end up—at the end of many such incidents and smaller wars and crises, you end up with the whole thing collapsing after the assassination of an archduke in Sarajevo.

LINDSAY:
So we can safely say, I take it, that a spheres of influence approach works if the great powers can actually agree on what their respected backyards, if I can use that term, are.

SHIDORE:
Yeah, two things. One is if they can agree to it. Second is if the world remains static for a long enough period of time. And we don't live in a static world by any stretch. Technology is moving at the speed of light. So that's different from the 19th century. And the third reason I think is the fact that the 19th century had these other spaces where European powers could project power and feel like they're winning. Yeah, the Global South, basically, the African continent, essentially, and Asia as well. Today, you don't have those spaces, not by a long mile.

LINDSAY:
So let's talk about where we are in the 21st century, Sarang. There's been a lot of talk about spheres of influence, as I mentioned, since January, and that has to do with the inauguration of President Trump. He's now serving his second term. There's been a lot of speculation that the president is pursuing a spheres of influence approach to world politics. You think that's a good characterization? And if so, what is it about what the president has done that leads us to believe that he's in some sense taking us back to the 19th century?

SHIDORE:
Well, in my article, I make the point early on that something along those lines is being tried. Now, obviously, there is no formal policy of spheres of influence. In Washington, there's unlikely to be, I think there's actually also been a denial by Marco Rubio, the Secretary of State. So there's not any official imprimatur on this thing. But if you look at the actions on the ground of President Trump and indeed his own inclinations when he makes his remarks on various issues, you can see the makings of such a policy. Whether it's Russia and Ukraine, where the statement from Washington has been, "Ukraine is not our war." And certainly, President Trump is trying for peace, but in essence, it does mean conceding a backyard to Russia, which he's perfectly willing to contemplate as a price for peace. He seems to be quite fine with it, actually. And then you have his comments on Taiwan in the past, which are not exactly about defending Taiwan, but much more on the economic threat posed by Taiwan. And, although, of course, U.S. policy in Asia hasn't changed hugely. President Trump in the Middle East, Donald Trump has gone back to the negotiating table with Iran, which is not a great power, but regionally is a very, let's say, influential power in its actions. And so he's engaging with Iran to find a deal, this time with the support of America's Gulf partners, which was not the case back when the first Iran deal was signed. And there seems to be an attempt to create some kind of an arrangement in the Middle East, where Iran gets some, if truncated, some place at the table. So this is being tried. And then also, there is this claim of the Western Hemisphere language that's come back.

LINDSAY:
Marco Rubio as Secretary of State called it our common home.

SHIDORE:
Yes, he did call it that. And the prioritization in some ways has been welcomed by Latin Americans because after the Cold War, they felt that the United States just forgot about the region and went off to the Middle East and then China. And now it's come back, but it's come back in sort of mixed ways because there are these claims to recover the Panama Canal. And there's of course, the openly expressed desire to annex Greenland and also Canada as it turns out. So that looks like the Monroe Doctrine coming back and America's backyard coming back with full force.

LINDSAY:
So you see that talk as being real and substantive and not simply the president trolling the Canadians or the Danes?

SHIDORE:
Well, some of these goals are clearly seem unrealistic, such as the one on Canada, but I think the intent on some of these things is real. I think there is a different way of looking at America's role in the world that President Trump is instinctively, I'm not saying he's worked out every detail and has a grand master plan, but he has an instinct in that direction where America becomes a power that finds some understanding with at least the two other great powers, Russia and China. And I'm going to say China here, despite the fact that on the ground, policies on China remain fairly similar to President Biden. And you had Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth visit the Philippines and Japan recently, and all the policy pronouncements work could have been made by the Biden administration. But nevertheless, there is again, Trump's own thinking as he has proclaimed it. And you could well see a swing in that there too. So I think the signs are all there.

LINDSAY:
Something jumped out in what you just said to me, Sarang, in that, as you said, two other great powers, Russia and China. I think by some people's count, there are more than two other great powers. I'm sure my friends in India would say that India is a great power. My friends in Europe would say the EU is a great power. Do you think President Trump regards them as great powers?

SHIDORE:
I don't think he does because his approach to any other power really is quite different from the way he's dealt with Russia and also with China and the way he's admired Xi Jinping as a strong leader and a major player and he's...and with China it's very hard to argue it's not a great power anyway, it's very obvious.

LINDSAY:
Yeah, I think everyone would agree that China qualifies. Most of the talk here in Washington is that China constitutes the one true pure competitor to the United States. What makes Russia a great power beyond having a large nuclear force?

SHIDORE:
Well, I would say first of all, it's the weakest of the three great powers, and it just about makes the cut in my view. And there's room for debate, but I would argue that Russia is a great power. It's not just the nuclear weapons, which is the obvious one. Ten thousand or so warheads puts it in a whole different category. But it's also the fact that Russia is an energy superpower, it is a major arms exporter. So it's autonomous in terms of its defense needs. It's autonomous in terms of energy. And it has got a very sizable military. Now, it's not a sort of military that can fight two wars at once or the way the United States defines its own, two and a half wars or what have you. But remember, Russia is the inheritor of an empire, the Soviet Empire. The Soviet Empire was not just about material power, which actually declined later on anyway. It was also about a certain kind of institutional DNA of exerting influence, running operations in distant lands, and essentially, ability to create havoc or mischief in places that are quite far.
So Russia's presence in the Sahel in Africa, for example. They're present in multiple countries now. In the Sahel, they have displaced the French, the Russians are angling for bases in parts of the Middle East, Africa. There's also Russia's ability to weather anything that is thrown at it. So another thing about a great power is its ability to deter or ability to withstand a united attack. When I say attack on military necessarily, which is pressure of enormous kinds. And of course, we have seen that post Ukraine, that the whole of the West and Japan got together and said, "We will sanction you Russia and we will bring you to your knees." And that didn't really work. And of course, China is one big reason, but again, the Russia-China relationship at one level puts Russia as number two, but another level keeps it as a player as well.

LINDSAY:
Yeah. My sense also is that the Russians see themselves as a great power, as the Soviet Union saw itself as a great power, as Imperial Russia saw itself as a great power. Certainly, President Putin sees Russia as a great power and expects to be treated in such a way. Now, Sarang, you titled your piece in Foreign Policy, "Spheres of Influence are Not the Answer," so I know you're a skeptic of the idea of spheres of influence and their ability to work. Why is that?

SHIDORE:
Well, like I said at the outset, it's a concept that should be taken seriously. It has a historical pedigree, there are arguments in favor of it. But at the end of the day, when I look at all of the moving pieces on this and the drivers and benefits and costs, I came down in the piece as saying, "This is not the way we should go" as a normative argument as well. But I also think it's a argument that's not practicable. So it's not just about it not being good, but it's actually not achievable in our time. And I laid out a few reasons in the piece for that. First of all, I think that the kind of sphere of influence that Washington appears to be staking its claim on, in effect, is quite expensive, it's not just the Americas. And I said this in the piece that there's a lot of talk about the Americas now being United States home, and it's going to confine its use of force to the Americas, essentially, leaving the rest of the world to its own volition.

LINDSAY:
So we have interests beyond the Western Hemisphere?

SHIDORE:
Much beyond. And I think we are seeing that in terms of, for example, the U.S. has proclaimed the right to mine deep sea resources on the seabed in the high seas. So this is not a part of anybody's "EEZ," or exclusive economic zone, these are just part of the global commons, as they call it. And there's a scrupulous understanding under law and norms that that is not something that just any nation can just go and take for itself. And the U.S. has now said that it can, and there will be of course, legal arguments on it. But this is a expansive and sweeping new claim. There's also recently we've seen President Trump's comments on South Africa in the way allegedly is conducting a "white genocide." That's going deep into the sovereign affairs of South Africa. South Africa is not in the Americas, quite far. And then of course, there is the United States posture in Asia, which hasn't really shifted in dramatic ways. And remember, China has risen from an almost nothing power in the 70s to a major great power today. And there doesn't seem to be a substantial sphere of influence on offer to China, maybe Taiwan, but really the rest of the Asian allies and partners are very much firmly, a goal of Washington is to keep them firmly embedded within the structures of U.S. land architectures in Asia. So do I see a significant implicit, let me underline, implicit offer to the other great powers, where there's a substantial concession to them in a way that will make them happy? I don't. Especially, for China, I don't think so. For Russia, maybe, but for China it seems not to be there. And then of course, there's a Global South, which I think in the 19th century, the African continent was simply carved up by European powers. Today it's very, very hard to do that even in the Americas in my view. And I laid that out in the piece. And finally, we didn't have a complex interdependence in the 19th century. Today's modern life, and we are all addicted to our mobile cell phones and all the gadgets we have at home, and even countries all across the world, really, even middle classes in Asia and Latin America live by that. And to imagine a world where you carve up things and center autarky as a principle of economic life, the cost is quite immense of that. We will not have modern life in the way we know it. And I do not think Americans are willing to brook that at the end of the day or anybody else. So for all of these reasons, I think the new spheres of influence approach is unworkable and ultimately also not a good thing in the sense that I don't think the insurance policy against great power war was ever that firm. And second, today we have a more dynamic world with more rising Germanys potentially down the road. Many middle powers are looking for expanded interest and interests are expanding as they're rising, they're looking for more. And I think the three great powers may not be willing to brook that. So again, you're in sort of a pre-World War I situation if this concept is really implemented, even if it were practical to do so.

LINDSAY:
I think there are two really important points there, Sarang, and I want to sort of disentangle them a bit. One is about the economic connectedness. And the other is about the agency that countries besides the big three have in all of this. That is they don't simply have to take orders from Washington, Beijing, or Moscow, or if India asserts itself as a great power, from Delhi. But let's talk about the economic point first because I think it gets to this idea, or it challenges a core idea of the sphere of influence approach, which you can actually draw on a map sort of backyards, neighborhoods that a great power is entitled to dominate. And it turns out that it's really hard in a modern interconnected world to do so. I'll just note you were talking a moment ago about America's security alliances in Asia. One of the remarkable things is that for many of our security partners, they have deep economic ties with China. They sell a lot of stuff to China. The Australians may be part of a military alliance with the United States, but they want to ship iron and they want to ship wheat, they want to ship wine and lots of other things to China. Likewise, even here in the Americas, just take Brazil. Brazil has big economic interest in being able to ship things to China, which really complicates any effort to sort of create or encapsulate or insulate the Western Hemisphere from Asia.

SHIDORE:
Absolutely. A complex interdependence is running all across the table here. It's not just a United States coupled with other economies or other sources of natural minerals and the like, but it's also our allies and partners as you correctly point out. And are they willing to be a part of a sphere in a sense and isolate themselves from China and also Russia in some cases? No, they are not. And they really would like it both ways. They would like America to be present in Asia, for example, many of them do, but they don't want China not to be present. And certainly, in the economic sphere, while they have concerns about the rise of China.

LINDSAY:
And I would also say just on that second aspect of terms of the agency that countries in the Global South have, they also have something today they didn't have a hundred or a hundred and fifty years ago. That is they have activated domestic publics that have views on what their country should do, that have a sense of national sovereignty and national dignity. And so even in cases where a country in the Global South may be weaker than one of the great powers, they have their own domestic politics to put up with. They can't simply give the great power what it wants simply because it's demanded it. It'll be very unpopular politically at home.

SHIDORE:
Absolutely. I think that one dynamic that's really survived all the vicissitudes of the last hundred years is nationalism. I think every country, not just a great power, every middle power and even lesser than middle powers are deeply nationalistic.

LINDSAY:
I knew there was a single word that summed up what I was trying to say.

SHIDORE:
Yeah. It's a really potent brew, when nationalism becomes a sort of a reigning—it's almost like the air we breathe. It's not even something that we notice, it's everywhere. And when you have that potent force and people are willing to sacrifice many things for it, or nations as they see it, prestige and pride and territory, then in our age, no great power can force something else down people's throats for too long.

LINDSAY:
So what then is your prescription for U.S. foreign policy? You are, I think it's safe to say a skeptic of efforts to sustain American primacy. In many ways, a sphere of influence approach addresses some of your concerns. It's about limiting American overreach, but you don't think it's practical given all of the things we've just discussed. So where's the United States go?

SHIDORE:
That's a million-dollar question. I think in the piece, I laid out what I thought was not a good idea and what was not workable. I think it's a big question as to what the U.S. should do. Now, I think one thing President Trump has in my view, done in a positive sense moved away from is I think there's an implicit acceptance, if not operationalized fully. There's an implicit acceptance that the world is no longer unipolar or unipolarity is declining rather quickly. I think that acceptance is there in this administration that you did not have in any previous administration. Even the first Trump term actually did not have that. So you have a Trump 2.0 that's quite different. So that actually I think is welcome in the sense it's recognizing a reality. And I think the first step in a good grand strategy is to recognize the world for what it is and not what we would like it to be. So that's a great first step. Then the question is, where does the U.S. go from here? I offered some thoughts in an op-ed for The New York Times I wrote last year. I think it was in November after the election, soon after, like a few days. And I actually looked at the practice of—this is before President Trump had been sworn in. So you still had a Biden administration. And I sort of looked at the practice of U.S. allies and partners in the last some years. And I made the argument that U.S. allies and partners are increasingly hedging over the last ten, fifteen years even. And I gave some examples. I gave examples in Asia, Thailand, I gave examples in the Middle East or Europe, Turkey. I even gave some examples in Europe. And even Japan has some, I argued, has some faint stirrings of it. South Korea certainly, has shown some of that. So what I said was that this is the trend of our times is hedging. And the pioneers of hedging have actually been historically in the Global South, because in the Global South is where you had the Non-Aligned Movement, which later of course, the Cold War ends, and then it ends, the Movement ends, but the basic impulse remains. And very early on, a country like India has strongly adhered to strategic autonomy, which is essentially a strategy of hedging as well. And other countries too. So now allies and partners are embracing it. And with President Trump now coming to power, I said the United States perhaps cannot fight it, it should be ready for more of this. And the way to meet this challenge is perhaps to start learning how to hedge ourselves. How do we hedge as a great power? I just posed that question at the end, I didn't answer it, but I will answer it at some point, I hope.

LINDSAY:
Well, I look forward to hearing your answer but let me ask you a different question, which is, do you think the United States can accept other countries hedging? Does that go with our national character? It seems to me, just getting back to the thesis of your Foreign Policy piece, that if other countries start to hedge, that's likely to breed resentment by the United States because it's going to mean that countries in the zone, the neighborhood that the United States thinks of as its own, let me put that in quotation marks, are going to be straying outside, sort of undermining this whole notion that we have a backyard. We certainly don't like it when countries in the Western Hemisphere get too close to, whether it's Russia or to China.

SHIDORE:
Indeed, this reminds me of John Foster Dulles, a former Secretary of State, of course, in the 50s, who called non-alignment, quote-unquote, "immoral." And that's certainly been, of course, later on, the U.S. became a little more accepting of it. But fundamentally, the United States is at some level a moralist power.

LINDSAY:
Moralist?

SHIDORE:
Moralist. Right. Moral power is one thing, but it's moralist in terms of the way it looks at the world. There's a right and a wrong in many situations. There's the good guys and the bad guys.

LINDSAY:
And we're the good guys?

SHIDORE:
Yeah. Yeah, we are the good guys, of course. And this is an impulse that's very much there. I think it comes from the fact that the U.S. is the first modern democracy. This was revolutionary what happened in that war when the king was told that he could go packing. And George Washington then said, "I don't want to be a king and there shall not be a king." I think this is just an incredible contribution that the U.S. made. I think starting from that, and then of course, the great wrong of slavery, which was corrected in the 19th century and then desegregation. So there is a sense that America, what's the quote there? The arc of justice is long, but it always bends—the arc of history is long, but it always bends towards justice, I think is the quote. So there is that sense. And from that comes difficulty to see countries as being sort of in between that, neither good, quote-unquote, nor bad, neither on one side nor the other, not necessarily on our side. They may be today, they may not be tomorrow. Are they a friend or a foe? And this kind of a messy world though is a reality of our world, and we have to embrace that way of thinking much more. And we have had, for example, we have had a realist foreign policy in periods. Nixon, Kissinger on China was one. China was not seen as a very positive regime, but yet I think this was one of their great moves that they said, "Let's embrace China." Not endorse China, but have a relationship with China. And I'm not advocating in The New York Times piece, ignoring the sort of normative ideas that shape America, but I am hinting towards perhaps that we need to inject more realism in the way we look at the world.

LINDSAY:
Well, I take that point, Sarang, and I will note that U.S. foreign policy has in a number of cases, really tried to live up to its values and done a lot for others. One can obviously hold up World War I and certainly, World War II, creation of the United Nations trying to create a liberal rules-based order with all the shortcomings it may have still, a notable departure from much of the rest of world history. In closing, any advice to offer the Trump administration or to Americans as they think about the future of American grand strategy?

SHIDORE:
I think one thing I'm a little concerned about is that we are rushing into too many things too quickly. And what I would say is that this is a momentous moment, and the United States might want to—Washington might want to take a step back, take a deep breath and think through this before dramatic changes in relationships with allies or partners or foes or the in-betweens. That extends to economics, that extends to security. The best minds can be tapped for this. There are some of those minds in Washington, there are elsewhere. And crafting a strategy is not an overnight thing. Certainly, should not be done on impulse or emotion. So I think that's the one thing that I would say at this point.

LINDSAY:
That reminds me of the old saying, act in haste, repent at leisure.

SHIDORE:
That's right.

LINDSAY:
On that note, I'll close up The President's Inbox for this week. My guest has been Sarang Shidore, director of the Global South Program at the Quincy Institute. Sarang, delight to chat.

SHIDORE:
Thank you so much, Jim.

LINDSAY:
Please subscribe to The President's Inbox on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you listen. And leave us a review, we love the feedback. The publications mentioned in this episode and a transcript of our conversation are available on the podcast page for The President's Inbox on CFR.org. As always, opinions expressed on The President's Inbox are solely those of the host or our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. Today's episode was produced by Justin Schuster, with recording engineer Jamie Stoffa and Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. This is Jim Lindsay. Thanks for listening.