The Limits of American Power
by leonidas zelmanovitz
If an American-backed world order is to continue to do good in the world, it will require the recognition of other powers' legitimate spheres of influence.
It is well accepted among foreign relations specialists that at the time of the Cold War (1945–89) we lived in a “bipolar” world, with the United States and the Soviet Union competing for global hegemony. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, we lived in a “unipolar” world, with the United States as the sole superpower from 1989 to 2008 and the beginning of the Great Recession. Finally, we entered the “multipolar” world that we live in today, with three global superpowers: the United States, China, and Russia, and a number of regional powers, such as India and Iran.
To understand how global order might be maintained and a war of annihilation averted, we might recur to a neglected concept that emerged as the last multipolar era was ending: respect for great power spheres of influence.
Cold War Spheres of Influence
Many of the arrangements that brought us through the bipolar era unscathed were shaped— if not implemented—during the Second World War, out of a process of negotiation between great powers.
The composition of the Security Council of the United Nations, for instance, reflected the leading allies in WWII: the US, UK, France, the USSR, and China. The monetary arrangements agreed to at the Bretton Woods Treaty of 1944, though centered on the US dollar, were made with due consideration of the concerns of the other powers. (So much so that years later, the system crumbled because it became too onerous for the US to honor its commitments to redeem its currency in gold when asked by the central banks of other members.)
One important aspect of the international order that was shaped during WWII and helped prevent another war in Europe was the delineation of spheres of influence between the leading powers. Exhibit A is the “percentage agreement” reached between Churchill and Stalin in Moscow concerning their two countries’ respective influence in the Balkans. The partition of Germany and the acknowledgment of the Baltic States and Poland as part of the Soviet sphere of influence were also part of that, of course.
So it wasn’t simply a balance of power between the Soviet Union and the United States that prevented a nuclear war: it was also an acknowledgment that each one of them was more or less free to act in its own sphere of influence without the interference of the others. The free hand the Soviets had in Eastern Europe and the many American interventions in Latin America during the Cold War attest to this reality.
The stationing of nuclear missiles in Turkey and the consequent Cuban crisis in 1962 was solved under the spheres-of-influence paradigm, even if the great powers were testing the limits of how much they could encroach upon the other’s sphere.
One of the failures of the current international arrangements is that they were designed to operate by consensus, with respect on the part of the superpowers for their respective spheres of influence. But that was not to be. The consensual approach followed during WWII was not followed by the superpowers in the following years. Nor were their respective spheres of influence as well defined around the globe as they were in Europe.
For instance, the British and French could not solve the Suez Canal crisis of 1956 on their own terms—the US would not let them do that.
The Chinese found it intolerable that after repelling the North Korean invasion, South Korea and its allies invaded the north, and came closer to the Chinese border. It was fine for North Korea to erase South Korea, but the risk of having American troops so close to Beijing was unacceptable.
Many other regional conflicts took place on the borders of ill-defined spheres of influence—the Vietnam War and the Israeli-Arab wars being two examples.
The Soviets used all the tricks in the book to check American hegemony around the world: Marxist, socialist, anti-colonial, and anti-Zionist ideologies, support for terrorism, narcotics, industrial espionage, you name it. Sure, the global communism of the Third International and its affiliates and offshoots like Forum de São Paulo are expansionist ideologies, and so it is possible that they would not succumb to realpolitik considerations and limit themselves, even if better-delineated spheres of influence were designed and the consensual arrangements among the permanent members of the UN Security Council were taken to the letter.
Alas, we will never know, since the superpowers and their clients early in the game decided simply to “contain” each other instead of finding ways to better define their respective spheres of influence.
Like all other counterfactuals, this one would be impossible to prove, but it is interesting and illuminating to speculate about what the Soviets would have bargained for in exchange for ending their support of leftist and narco guerrillas in Latin America, Palestinian terrorists, revisionist powers in the Middle East, and the enemies of the open society inside the Western intelligentsia. Would that not have been worth, say, the Dardanelles or shared control of the Persian Gulf?
Despite many setbacks, the United States “won” the Cold War, and by 1989, achieved global hegemony. Only to squander it in little more than a decade. There are many dimensions to the relative decline of American power after the Cold War, a decline which has gone hand-in-hand with the decline of American exceptionalism.
America’s Changing Position
At the end of WWII, the US was responsible for 25% of the world’s GDP and was the sole nuclear power. Its political institutions had survived the carnage and economic destruction of the last 30 years (1914–45), and there were no profound ideological differences among the people. Americans’ worldview was predominantly centrist and homogeneous.
True, the national debt held by the public had grown to more than 100% of GDP, but it gradually receded in the coming decades. It is excusable that at the peak of its power, the United States did not have much incentive to accommodate the aspirations of rising powers like China and Russia, much less anyone else.
Similarly, when the Berlin Wall fell, the US saw an opportunity to expand NATO and to integrate former satellites of the Soviet Union as part of the Western sphere of influence. The Russians did not like that, but there was little they could do since they were dealing with the fragmentation of their empire.
Nevertheless, it seems a reasonable supposition that the 1993 Budapest Memorandum, through which Ukraine gave its nuclear weapons and the Black Sea fleet up to Russia in exchange for toothless security assurances from Western allies, was an acknowledgment that Ukraine was part of the now-significantly diminished Russian sphere of influence, and that in case of war between Russia and Ukraine, the Western powers would support Ukraine with blankets and medical supplies, but nothing else. And that was what happened when Russia invaded Crimea and the Donbas in 2014.
By that time, however, the world was already the multipolar one we live in today. Also, in the early 2010s, fiscal considerations forced the United States to abandon the “Two war construct,” the doctrine by which the United States would define the size of its military as sufficient to wage two major wars simultaneously. It was already difficult for the United States to pursue its strategic interests in a world in which it was by far the strongest superpower, but it has become much harder now that there is at least one other superpower. If that was not bad enough, it seems that the framework of respecting the spheres of influence of the other superpowers had been thrown out of the window. This was a mistake.
As we can see from the examples mentioned above, it is much easier for the United States to pursue its national interests within its own sphere of influence when its foreign policy recognizes the spheres of the other powers. That was true when the United States was much more powerful than what it is now, and it is even more true today.
For much of the post-war period, it was convenient for the United States to maintain a military strong enough to engage in any corner of the globe unimpeded. It was much easier to protect something like freedom of navigation, for instance, by unilaterally enforcing it than by relying on the mutual interests of other powers in keeping the sea lanes open in their backyards.
The need to establish a new modus vivendi with the other powers, especially the revisionists ones of Russia and China, will only become more pressing in the future.
Still, the other superpowers (Russia, China, India, and the Europeans) do have a shared interest in the global order. That is not to say, of course, that the superpowers, including the United States, never have interests in conflict with the global order. It may well be the case that under certain circumstances, the downsides of the global order may outweigh the benefits for a given country. In those circumstances, we may expect that it will become a revisionist power, acting against the global order and not as a supporter of that order.
On the whole, however, it has been a great diplomatic blunder over the last several decades that the United States has actively pushed world powers into a revisionist position, rather than trying to reassure them that their interests can best be attained within the American-led global order.
It is possible, of course, that there is nothing the US can do to accommodate China and Russia, and the alternatives are between containment or surrender. Possible, but not likely.
It is difficult for me to believe that the Chinese government would consider it to be in their interest to confront the West if the West allowed China to control the South China Sea and to incorporate Taiwan. It is similarly difficult for me to believe that the Russian government would prefer to continue as a pariah if the West negotiated with them a new sphere of influence which included Moldova and Ukraine.
It is also difficult for me to believe that a reformed UN Security Council—in which the permanent members (perhaps expanded to include India) decide their differences by consensus—would not be preferable to bringing the world to the brink of nuclear war as more and more regional conflicts may grow out of control.
What the Future Holds
The American naval build-up in the Mediterranean immediately following the October 7 attack on Israel, has been sufficient to prevent the conflict from broadening, as much as unsavory characters from Tehran to Ankara would be tempted to do otherwise. But can we say that this deterrence power would be respected if China and Russia had decided to challenge it?
The fact that they are supporting their clients in the region, such as Iran and Syria, and trying to create as many problems as they can for the United States and its allies should not distract from the fact that they are not risking direct confrontation to keep the terrorists of Hamas in the field. Their restraint may be, in part, that Israel likely has its own nuclear weapons, and it is unclear what they would contemplate doing if their existence were to be put at risk.
What China and Russia would do if the United States decided to wage war on Iran is a different matter.
The need to establish a new modus vivendi with the other powers, especially the revisionist ones of Russia and China, will only become more pressing in the future. Despite widespread rhetorical bluster to the contrary, Russia and China are rational actors. Iran, however, may not be. If the United States must one day contain Iran militarily, which is not unlikely, an agreement with Russia, China, and India, would be required.
I don’t know what the price of that would be—it may well be too expensive. But if it is not realistically tried, we will never know.
I recently attended a lecture by Prof. John Mearsheimer. It is difficult not to appreciate his realism. Yet, cynical as I am, I am not prepared to be as cynical as he is in some of his assessments. They remind me of people who say that “judges are just politicians in robes” or that “taxes are theft.” I disagree with that. I believe that there is something we call justice and that it is something more than the residue of politics. I believe that there is a distinction between a legitimate state and a gang of stationary robbers, although both live off others. A set of moral values is what gives legitimacy to the state in its use of force, its imposition of taxes, and so forth. It is precisely that moral foundation that a group of terrorists like Hamas or a gang of common criminals like the drug dealers controlling large swaths of territory in Latin America lack.
In the same way, I understand the American-led global order as a force for good in this world. It is not perfect—nothing is perfect—but it is better than all the alternatives. Think about someone living in the Byzantine Empire in the seventh century. Would you side with Byzantium or with the invading Arabs?
However, for Byzantium to survive (another eight centuries, in fact) it was forced to regroup in Asia Minor, and retreat from Syria and the rest of the Levant, leaving behind Egypt, the most important of all Roman provinces.
The US can still do good in this world, but if it is to do so, it needs to recognize its limits, bring together its allies like Europe and India, and by maintaining imperfect but manageable spheres of influence, reach a détente with Russia and China.
Leonidas Zelmanovitz, a fellow with the Liberty Fund, holds a law degree from the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul in Brazil and an economics doctorate from the Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Spain.
