Which countries exert a sphere of influence, anyway?

So long as there have been empires and great powers, there have been “spheres of influence”. The term may not always have been used, but the concept goes back thousands of years. From the tributary system under China’s Ming emperors, whereby states in East and South-East Asia provided symbolic obeisance but often practised little or no political subordination, to the 19th-century colonial carve up of Africa and much of the developing world, powerful countries have exerted degrees of suzerainty over or effective control of, say, the foreign policy of less powerful polities.

According to US Secretary of State Antony Blinken, that era is over. “One country does not have the right to dictate the policies of another or to tell that country with whom it may associate; one country does not have the right to exert a sphere of influence. That notion should be relegated to the dustbin of history.” Blinken was speaking last month, but he was echoing Condoleezza Rice, former president George W Bush’s then secretary of state, who in 2008 described spheres of influence as “archaic” and no longer appropriate as a defining characteristic of great powers.

Both Blinken and Rice were targeting Russia. In 2008, it was after Georgian forces entered the breakaway region of South Ossetia and Russia invaded Georgia in return, forcing the latter to capitulate. Moscow then recognised and backed the independence of South Ossetia and another region, Abkhazia.

Today the dispute is over Ukraine and Nato. Russian President Vladimir Putin is demanding a guarantee that Ukraine will not be admitted to Nato, and he also wants the alliance’s armed forces to roll back from their current positions in other former Eastern Bloc countries that joined Nato after the end of the Cold War. The massing of Russian military personnel on Ukraine’s eastern border has led to fears of war if Putin is not assuaged.

Critics warn darkly that the Russian president is trying to rebuild the Soviet Union piece by piece. Others, myself included, thought the advance of Nato to Russia’s borders was bound to be seen as a threat by Moscow and missed the opportunity to forge a new relationship in an era when Nato’s very purpose – opposition to the Communist bloc – had ceased to exist. But the Biden administration’s insistence that Russia has no right at all to a sphere of influence in its historical backyard, and that the very concept should be junked, is quite apart from that. It is “more than a little hypocritical”, as a Cato Institute paper put it in 2014. America wants to deny any regional dominance to both Moscow or Beijing. “Yet, Washington has intervened militarily as recently as the 1980s [Grenada and Panama] or even the 1990s [Haiti] within its traditional sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere.” The paper rightly notes that US opposition to spheres of influence is “highly selective”. No one, it appears, has the right to have one apart from America.

The US claim to dominion over the Western Hemisphere, the Monroe Doctrine, was declared “over” by then secretary of state John Kerry in 2013. But in 2018, Rex Tillerson, Kerry's successor under former president Donald Trump, said “it’s as relevant today as it was the day it was written” and in 2019, Trump’s national security adviser John Bolton said it was “alive and well”.