Spheres of Illusion
What will replace the US-led unipolar order? In a recent essay in these pages, Daniel Bessner argues that as US hegemony wanes, a new multipolar order will emerge, shaped by great powers vying to build their own spheres of influence. As the United States, China, Russia, India, and the European Union project their might in regions of strategic interest, the rest of the world will be forced to pick sides. He predicts the ascendance of several “spheres of influence of various geographic scales.” He writes:
The United States looks set to dominate the Western Hemisphere and the Middle East; China to dominate East and Southeast Asia; India to dominate South Asia as it battles China for influence in its near abroad; Russia to dominate its own near abroad; and the European Union, led by France and Germany, to dominate Western and Central Europe. For their part, the middle powers [such as the United Kingdom, Japan, and Iran] will probably align with one of the superpowers.
A sphere of influence entails two basic features. A dominant external power generally constrains the foreign-policy autonomy and certain domestic decision-making of weaker states inside a given region while also preventing rival powers from exercising comparable influence. Spheres of influence are more intrusive for the weaker states than ordinary alliances but less stringent than colonial rule. Eastern Europe during the Cold War is an instructive example: Moscow did not formally annex Poland or Hungary, but it did expansively influence what their governments could do at home and abroad while keeping Washington from cultivating meaningful countervailing ties.
With this definition in mind, three faulty premises become apparent in the spheres of influence narrative.
First, even in regions where a single power asserts dominance, the assumption that rival powers will simply respect those lines and refrain from pursuing their interests is unrealistic. It is hard to imagine that China will simply concede that Latin America belongs in the US orbit. Over the last two decades, Beijing has sought to enhance its influence by integrating the region into its digital, financial, and infrastructural ecosystems; its official strategy paper for Latin America, published in late 2025, gives us no reason to think it will stop. China has every incentive to keep building ties—and, unlike the Cold War, when the US and the USSR largely excluded one another from their respective zones of influence through force and economic incompatibility, no such option is viable today. The same logic applies in reverse: The US will not stop competing for influence in Southeast Asia simply because Beijing claims regional primacy. As Stephen Walt argues, “delineating each great power’s respective sphere by drawing some lines on a map is not going to resolve matters for very long.”
Second, great powers’ capacity to impose their will on weaker nations and to keep other players out tends to be exaggerated in today’s interconnected world. To say that the US will “dominate” Latin America, as Bessner does, is to use the word in a sense the concept cannot bear.
China is already, by a wide margin, the largest trading partner of countries like Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, and Peru, and the EU has recently locked in an ambitious trade agreement with Mercosur, the region’s largest bloc. Meanwhile, Brazil’s trade with the US has declined sharply in response to US tariffs imposed by Trump. The exclusion criterion of spheres of influence—the more demanding of the two—simply does not hold.
Nor does the spheres of influence picture hold for most other regions of the world. India is unable to exclude Chinese influence from South Asia; Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Maldives, and Nepal have all deepened ties with Beijing despite Delhi’s protests. China does not exclude US influence from Southeast Asia; Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, and Singapore are doing the opposite of picking a side. Russia has watched Central Asian states quietly multiply their partners since 2022.
Even in Venezuela, where the US forces removed President Maduro and essentially installed a president dependent on the US, Washington’s dominance may not be lasting. Its highly interventionist stance risks planting the seeds of anti-American nationalism—similar to what occurred in Cuba, where Washington’s interventions produced a backlash in 1959. Recent polls suggest that support for Trump among Venezuelans has declined significantly in the months after removing Maduro, which may facilitate the rise of figures who build their strategy on resisting Washington. In response to US actions in Venezuela, numerous South American governments—irrespective of ideological orientation—are seeking to reduce their vulnerability to the United States.
Rather than picking sides, the majority of Latin American states are seeking to increase their autonomy through diversification in order not to depend on any single major power. Despite some symbolic gestures, even ostensibly pro-Trump leaders such as Javier Milei are not meaningfully moving away from China in key areas such as trade. Similar dynamics occur around the world, rendering the spheres of influence model inadequate. The more explicit, coercive, and openly territorial the great powers’ posture is—as the US is in Latin America—the more countries will diversify their partnerships. This is why the so-called Donroe Doctrine is largely seen to strengthen Beijing’s influence, while offering opportunities for the EU, Russia, and India. Mercosur and the EU finally agreed to implement their historic trade deal as Trump intensified his efforts to project control over the Western Hemisphere. Brazil’s strategy of multi-alignment reduces its dependency on any single power: Brasília refused to join the US government’s critical mineral alliance, yet it also declined to join China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
The same logic applies around the world: Governments are diversifying their partnerships to increase their strategic wiggle room. Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia use their ties to the US, Europe, and India to balance China. They are not joining a Chinese sphere; they are using multipolarity to remain independent. Just as the US, China, and other great powers will keep pursuing their interests inside regions that rivals consider their own, they are largely incapable of stopping these rivals from doing the same in the regions they themselves claim.
In an extremely globalized world, with complex value chains that bind all regions together, the vast majority of the Global South sits outside any plausible great-power sphere. Geographic proximity matters less than before. Policymakers in Brasília, Riyadh, and Jakarta see unstable multipolarity as an opportunity—it allows them to diversify partnerships, engage in newer diplomatic forums such as BRICS, strengthen their role in more traditional structures, and play off great powers against each other to extract bigger concessions.
Yet the most significant weakness of the spheres of influence model is that it imagines a world in which great powers act and everyone else is acted upon. As a historical analysis shows, this understates the role that weaker states and colonized peoples have played in shaping the world order. In fact, at most of the major inflection points of the past century, governments and movements from outside the great-power club have done a substantial share of the work of constructing what followed, even when they were excluded from the rooms where the supposed architects met. This is the deeper reason Bessner’s spheres of influence model misleads: The global order has never been something great powers simply impose from above, and there is no reason to expect the new one to be the exception.
As early as the Second Hague Conference in 1907, a group of Latin American states led by Brazilian statesman Ruy Barbosa insisted that international governance had to rest on sovereign equality rather than great-power prerogative. At issue was a proposal for a permanent international court whose judges would be chosen according to national power—with the major powers holding permanent seats and lesser states rotating through the remaining seats, or excluded altogether. Barbosa rejected the premise that a state’s standing before international law should track its military or economic weight. Partly because of his dissent, this model of differentiated rights failed to consolidate.
Similarly, the 1919 Paris Peace Conference is often narrated as a moment when four Western leaders—Wilson, Lloyd George, Clemenceau, Orlando—redrew the map of Europe and set the terms of the postwar order. Yet the principle most closely associated with that conference, national self-determination, took the shape it did largely because of pressure from those outside the negotiating rooms. Wilson’s narrow vision of the concept, restricted in practice to white European peoples, was expanded into a universal principle by surging nationalist movements across the world. Anti-colonial movements had been pressing the claim for self-determination for decades; in 1919 they sought hard to shape the conference toward these ends.
The May Fourth Movement—a broader eruption of nationalist and anti-imperial sentiment—was galvanized in part by the conference’s decision to transfer German concessions in Shandong to Japan rather than return them to China. Indian nationalists, whose demands for self-rule went unheard at Paris, used the moment to intensify their case against British rule. A young Vietnamese man named Nguyen Ai Quoc—later Ho Chi Minh—submitted a petition for Vietnamese self-rule. Egyptian nationalists led by Saad Zaghloul launched a countrywide revolt after the British arrested him and exiled him to Malta. When pressure forced his release and he traveled to Paris, the conference refused to hear Egypt’s case—but great powers could no longer contain developments there. None of these movements got what they asked for in Paris. But the principle they asserted—that sovereignty was not a privilege of European peoples—outran what any great power was willing to grant, and over the following half-century it became the legal principle that dissolved the European colonial system, a key development that took place not thanks to great powers, but in spite of them.
The pattern is also visible in 1945. The UN Charter is often read as a great-power document, symbolized by the Security Council with its five vetoes. But the Charter that emerged from San Francisco was not the Charter that had been drafted at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, DC the year before by the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and China. Latin American delegations, joined by delegations from across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East, as well as several smaller European states, secured changes that the great powers had not initially wanted: human rights language in the Preamble and Article 1; stronger language in Article 2(7) limiting the UN’s power to intervene in member states’ internal affairs; a substantially expanded Economic and Social Council. The result was a Charter that simultaneously enshrined great-power privilege at the Security Council and codified sovereign equality everywhere else—a contradiction the Global South would spend the next forty years exploiting in order to dismantle the colonial system.
The existence of a sovereign India, for example, reflects the relevance of less powerful actors in the emergence of today’s order. As India’s former Minister of State for External Affairs Shashi Tharoor recalls, “We were denied democracy. We had to snatch it, seize it from [Britain]. With the greatest of reluctance, it was conceded.” The success of anti-colonial movements created one normative system for the globe, overcoming the obstacles created by Western-centric international law, and reinterpreting the United Nations Charter, which was, despite its innovations, partially designed to maintain the colonial system and great power rule. Non-Western powers were thus not always physically present during formal negotiations, but they have far more ownership of the post-World War II order than is commonly appreciated.
The post-Cold War order followed the same logic. The conventional account treats the 1990s as the moment Washington wrote the rules and everyone else signed on, but the reality was messier. At the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, developing countries successfully wrote the principle of “common but differentiated responsibilities” into the foundational climate convention, against active US resistance. That principle, which holds that historical polluters bear greater obligations than late developers, has structured every climate negotiation since, including the Paris Agreement. The World Trade Organization, founded three years later, similarly bore the imprint of developing-country pressure for special and differential treatment, and the Doha Round broke down in 2008 largely because developing countries, led by India, refused to accept terms the US and Europe considered settled. The order built after 1991 was less a great-power dictation than a long, contested negotiation in which the Global South repeatedly forced the great powers to compromise.
None of this means the great powers didn’t play a key role in creating today’s order. Rather, it shows the order has always been shaped by complex bargaining and contestation between great powers and the rest. The agency of the Global South was decisive at multiple turning points—even when it was often not recognized. Just like past orders, the next one is unlikely to be imposed from above.
The hedging strategies of Brazil, India, Indonesia, South Africa, and others are thus not passive reactions to great-power competition—they are an active effort to shape what comes next, and any prediction that ignores them will misread the emerging order. In some cases, such efforts are failing, and the influence of less prominent powers is often questioned. Raja Mohan, for example, argues that cooperation between middle powers “does not lead to much influence on a global order dominated by the United States and China.” Anne-Marie Slaughter recognizes efforts by middle powers to shape global outcomes, but says they lead to the emergence of an “armadillo order”—“lots of overlapping small groups of states and non-state actors taking, or at least contemplating, common action. Armadillos, of course, are also known for playing dead and curling into a defensive ball.”
Yet the pattern of constructive Global South agency extends well beyond obstruction or hedging. The Gaza ceasefire of October 2025 offers one illustration. While US leverage over Israel proved crucial, Qatar, Egypt, and Turkey provided important mediation infrastructure, maintaining direct channels with Hamas, conducting shuttle diplomacy, and applying sustained pressure on the militant group. Qatar had written the peaceful resolution of international disputes into its constitution as a pillar of foreign policy, and its indispensability in that process reflected decades of deliberate diplomatic positioning—not passive reaction to great-power competition but active construction of a mediating role that no great power could fill on its own.
This pattern dates back decades. In 1971, Pakistan was the only country trusted simultaneously in Washington and Beijing with a sensitive mission kept secret even from the State Department: It was a Pakistani government plane that carried Kissinger overnight from Pakistan to Beijing, opening the channel that made Nixon’s historic visit possible and reshaped the Cold War order. A decade later, when the United States and Iran were locked in a 444-day hostage crisis with no direct diplomatic channel between them, it was Algeria that brokered the Algiers Accords, securing the release of the American hostages through months of patient shuttle diplomacy and proposing the institutional architecture, including an Iran-US Claims Tribunal, that governed the financial settlement.
Constructive agency on the international stage has also taken the form of norm entrepreneurship. In 1999 and 2000, Brazil’s Health Minister José Serra used the threat of compulsory licensing—the legal override of pharmaceutical patents in a public health emergency—to force major drug companies to lower prices on antiretroviral drugs, dramatically expanding access to AIDS treatment. Serra then carried that fight to the WTO, where Brazil played a central role in negotiating the 2001 Doha Declaration, which affirmed every nation’s right to define its own public health emergencies and produce generic medicines accordingly. That precedent contributed to the 2020 push by India and South Africa—co-sponsored by more than 60 lower- and middle-income WTO members—to suspend intellectual property protections on COVID-19 vaccines and treatments. None of these cases amounts to the Global South rewriting the rules of the international system on its own. But they confirm what the historical record suggests: that the agency of states outside the great-power club is not merely obstructive or defensive—it is, at its best, capable of building the channels, norms, and institutions through which the emerging order will actually be governed.
The coming multipolar order is described by Bessner in terms that overstate the agency of the great powers and understate the agency of everyone else. What is emerging is not a map carved into spheres, but an order negotiated continuously between powers great and small—messier, less hierarchical, and less subject to anyone’s design than the spheres of influence framework assumes. Brazil, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Mexico, Nigeria, and others—these countries are not waiting to be sorted into anyone’s sphere. They are actively shaping the terms of their own engagement with the great powers, and with each other.
