There Is Only One Sphere of Influence

After the United States captured Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and President Donald Trump revived talk of acquiring Greenland, commentators reached for old clichés: the rebirth of the Monroe Doctrine, the return of great-power spheres of influence, the end of Pax Americana. But these episodes revealed something more exceptional. The world today has only one true sphere of influence. The United States alone dominates a vast home region, not merely as a buffer against competitors such as China and Russia, but as a hemispheric base from which American power and commerce can project outward, largely unconstrained by rivals.

This configuration has no modern precedent. During the Cold War, the American sphere was confronted by a vast Soviet one. In earlier, multipolar eras, European powers ruled overseas empires and planted colonies deep in the Western Hemisphere, contesting U.S. influence even close to home. But that world is long gone. The American sphere now stands alone. China and Russia cannot consolidate control over their own regions, much less project sustained power into the United States’ backyard. They can intimidate neighbors and sow disruption, but their influence quickly runs into resistance and chokepoints. The result is not multipolarity but stark asymmetry: one consolidated American sphere and contested space everywhere else.

This asymmetry produces U.S. dominance, but of a dangerous kind. A one-sphere world leaves Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin too aggrieved to accept the status quo and the United States too secure to take Eurasian threats seriously until they erupt. It also tempts Washington to trade stewardship of a global order for coercive rule in its own backyard, swapping forms of power that compound through trade and alliances for ones that breed backlash through resource extraction and imperial policing.

Yet this same imbalance also creates an opening. The United States can use its sphere not as a substitute for international order, but as its foundation. A one-sphere world gives Washington two rare advantages: unmatched power and a secure home base from which it could, if necessary, disengage from Eurasia. That pairing—strength with a credible exit option—is already sharpening incentives among U.S. allies to rearm. While pundits fixate on Davos speeches, states on the frontlines of Chinese and Russian coercion are starting to rebuild their militaries, industries, and supply chains, reviving what the liberal order gradually lost over time: capable partners for the United States. For the first time in decades, the outlines of a tougher, more resilient free world are coming into view. Whether these efforts endure will depend on whether the United States can avoid China and Russia’s greatest mistake—treating partners as vassals rather than contributors to shared strength.

ONLY GAME IN TOWN

Many analysts argue that U.S. primacy is fading and that the world is reorganizing into multipolar spheres. Some even urge Washington to grant China a sphere of influence in Asia and grant Russia one in eastern Europe in exchange for peace. But spheres of influence are not diplomatic concessions. They are political facts, produced by power, geography, and, above all, the choices of weaker states. A country commands a true sphere of influence only when its neighbors defer to it on security, when foreign rivals cannot intervene decisively, and when control can be sustained without the constant use of force. When those conditions are absent, simply recognizing a sphere changes nothing.

Historically, spheres of influence have been built in two main ways: through conquest, or by binding neighbors with security guarantees, market access, and institutions that make exit prohibitively costly. The methods of construction differ, but the requirements do not. A true sphere demands military dominance, economic centrality, and staying power. By those standards, the United States possesses a sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere. No other power has a comparable one.

Start with military dominance. Washington spends as much as 12 times more on defense than all other countries in the Western Hemisphere combined. South of the Rio Grande, roughly two-thirds of states maintain little more than internal security forces. Collectively, the region’s 33 countries field fewer than 700 combat aircraft, around 30 warships, and about 20 submarines—set against the United States’ nearly 3,000 combat aircraft, more than 120 warships, and roughly 65 submarines.

Canada is the partial exception, with a military power projection capacity comprised of two fighter squadrons, a single mechanized brigade, and a small frigate fleet. Even so, roughly half of its forces are unavailable at any given time because aging platforms are stuck in maintenance backlogs and chronic personnel shortages leave ships, aircraft, and units short of crew. Like their counterparts elsewhere in the hemisphere, Canadian forces also depend heavily on the United States for intelligence, refueling, transport, and targeting.

There is one consolidated American sphere and contested space everywhere else.

In practice, regional militaries function less as competitors than as auxiliaries to American power. Through access agreements and joint training programs spanning most of the hemisphere, the U.S. military enjoys near-complete freedom of action and can intervene with minimal resistance—as demonstrated most recently in Venezuela.

Economic centrality reinforces this dominance. The United States is the Western Hemisphere’s linchpin market. Nearly half of exports from South America, and anywhere from 60 to 80 percent of those from Canada and Mexico, go to the United States. This is not reroutable commodity trade of the kind many countries conduct with China, but tightly integrated supply chain trade—finished goods and components built specifically for the U.S. market. If U.S. neighbors lose that market, production will collapse rather than shift elsewhere.

The Western Hemisphere is also a de facto U.S. dollar zone. Several countries use the dollar outright, many peg their own currencies to it, and most regional trade and borrowing is U.S. dollar denominated. In crises, rescue finance runs through U.S. institutions, and remittances from the United States sustain large shares of GDP across Central America and the Caribbean. The result is structural leverage for the United States: other governments tied to the dollar have strong incentives to accommodate Washington rather than risk financial instability.

Finally, the United States has staying power because it is not trying to install an alien political or economic project in the region. The Soviet Union imposed communism on Eastern Europe and Central Asia through coercion, and when its power faltered, states defected immediately. The U.S. sphere works differently. Anti-American sentiment is widespread, but most governments in the Western Hemisphere are no longer organized around projects fundamentally hostile to American power. Latin America has moved away from state-led socialism and revolutionary nationalism—discredited by the collapses of Venezuela and Cuba—toward governments preoccupied with managing crime and inflation, building fiscal stability, and attracting private investment. These priorities do not make the region pro-American, but they limit the appeal of posturing against the United States and reduce incentives to challenge American primacy outright.

Just as important, there is no credible alternative to U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere. China and Russia offer transactions, not systems. Beijing builds infrastructure but pushes subsidized exports and opaque loans while extracting resources. Moscow sells commodities and weapons. Neither offers a political or economic framework that regional states can meaningfully join, nor an ideology most would choose to emulate. Both are ruled by brutal dictatorships with uncertain succession plans and erratic policy—Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s “zero COVID” lockdowns are only the most obvious examples—and neither could protect its closest regional client when Washington moved against Maduro. With populations and economies shrinking relative to the United States, China and Russia offer would-be partners a future of smaller markets, weaker balance sheets, and dependence on distant, capricious regimes.

NOT SO GREAT POWERS

Russian and Chinese spheres, if they existed, would not be subtle. Putin casts himself as a latter-day Peter the Great and portrays the post–Cold War order as having stripped Russia of its civilizational domain—the “Russian World,” a deliberately vague space defined by language, religion, and imperial history that extends well beyond Russia’s borders. A true Russian sphere would go far beyond the gray-zone coercion, such as assassinations or disinformation campaigns, that Moscow already employs against its neighbors. It would create a belt of fully neutralized states—the Baltics, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, perhaps even Poland and Romania—barred from NATO and the European Union, hosting no Western military forces, and aligning their foreign policies with that of Moscow. Their economies would be folded into a customs bloc, lowering trade barriers to Russia while raising them to the West. Russian troops and intelligence services would operate freely within the sphere. The Kremlin would screen leaders in each country and remove dissenters. In Putin’s telling, such a sphere would form “one of the poles of the modern world.”

A Chinese sphere would be broader still. Taiwan, parts of India, and perhaps some of Japan’s Ryukyu Islands would be absorbed outright. Australia, Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, and Vietnam would be pushed into strategic neutrality, with their militaries capped and U.S. forces expelled from their territories. The East China and South China Seas would become de facto Chinese waters, with neighbors forced to seek Beijing’s permission to operate beyond their own coasts. Economically, the arrangement would be neocolonial. As Chinese Premier Li Keqiang told Trump in 2017, China envisions a world in which it monopolizes advanced manufacturing while others supply commodities. States would borrow heavily from Beijing to buy Chinese goods and install Chinese systems, routing data and royalties back to Beijing while respecting the Chinese Communist Party’s redlines. Under this constant pressure, democratic institutions across Asia would steadily erode.

If these spheres sound far-fetched, it is because they are. Neither Russia nor China has the military dominance, economic centrality, or staying power to impose them. Russia’s failure is the starkest. It has thrown the full weight of its conventional military power at a single, poorer neighbor—Ukraine—mobilizing the Russian economy, emptying Soviet stockpiles, conscripting hundreds of thousands of Russian citizens, and calling in every ally it can muster. Yet after more than a decade of conflict, including four years of full-scale war, Russian forces have advanced barely 30 miles beyond their 2014 lines at a cost of 1.2 million casualties, comparable to total U.S. casualties in World War II.

Military failure has accelerated Russia’s economic decline. Cut off from European energy markets, hemorrhaging talent as millions of Russians flee the country, and devoting as much as half of its national budget (and nearly twice as much of its GDP as it did before the invasion) to military spending, Russia is becoming an insolvent, hypermilitarized petrostate able to wreck neighbors but unable to attract or lead them. In response, former Soviet states are dismantling their ties to Moscow, replacing Russian weapons with those from other countries, rerouting trade, settling disputes without Russian mediation, and pivoting toward China and Europe, whose economic influence in Russia’s near abroad now dwarfs Moscow’s. Once the main power linking Central Asia, the South Caucasus, and eastern Europe, Russia is increasingly being bypassed rather than obeyed.

China’s prospects look brighter. It generates roughly half of Asia’s GDP and accounts for nearly half of the continent’s military spending, dominates key industries, and is the top trading partner of nearly every Asian economy. Through island building in the South China Sea and investments in the global infrastructure project known as the Belt and Road Initiative, Beijing has extended its reach across Asia.

A one-sphere world gives Washington two rare advantages.

But scale is not overmatch. Unlike the United States, China operates in the world’s most competitive neighborhood. Its neighbors include seven of the world’s 15 most populous countries, four of the top 15 economies and military spenders, and four nuclear-armed states—along with several more that could rapidly acquire nuclear weapons. Over the past eight decades, Beijing has disputed borders with every one of its neighbors, fought wars against five of them—India, Japan, South Korea, the Soviet Union, and Vietnam—and still contests territory with at least ten. China also faces sustained pressure from the United States, which stations roughly 90,000 troops, hundreds of aircraft, and dozens of warships and missile batteries near China’s coast. When Washington first built its sphere in Latin America in the nineteenth century, Eurasia’s great powers were tied down fighting one another. Today, the United States, secure in the Western Hemisphere, projects immense power into China’s backyard.

Modern technology further constrains Chinese military power. Precision missiles, drones, and smart mines now allow even weaker states to destroy massed forces at a fraction of the cost—an effect on vivid display in Ukraine—and China’s neighbors have stockpiled these asymmetric weapons. Conquest, moreover, is no longer cumulative. In earlier eras, victors grew stronger as they expanded, seizing farms, factories, and resources. Today, advanced economies are more fragile: people flee, data disappears, and supply chains collapse. If China invaded Taiwan, for instance, the island’s semiconductor industry would likely be destroyed, leaving Beijing with ruins, not riches.

China also cannot buy a sphere. Unlike the United States, which pulls neighbors in through consumer demand, China pushes them away by flooding markets with subsidized exports that hollow out local industry. It now runs a record $1.2 trillion trade surplus and dumps excess goods abroad. In many Asian economies, imports from China have doubled over the past five years. The result is backlash, not deference. China lacks monetary pull as well: the renminbi still trails the U.S. dollar in Asian and global trade, and only about three percent of regional reserves are held in it.

Beijing has attempted to compensate through state-directed finance, but the Belt and Road Initiative has failed to make China Asia’s economic hub. Several of the region’s largest economies—India, Japan, and South Korea—never joined, and more than three-quarters of China’s overseas lending has gone to middle- and upper-income countries outside any plausible Chinese sphere, led by the United States and Russia. Meanwhile, widespread defaults have turned China’s financial reach into a liability, recasting Beijing as the world’s largest debt collector instead of a development partner. By 2022, roughly 60 percent of China’s overseas lending portfolio—and by 2023, nearly 80 percent of its developing-world borrowers—was tied to governments in debt distress, triggering serial renegotiations with countries such as Kenya, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and Zambia.

China remains an industrial superpower (it produces roughly a third of the world’s manufactured goods and dominates sectors from shipbuilding to electric vehicles and batteries), but the foundations of that power are eroding. The Chinese economy has been shrinking relative to the United States’ in dollar terms since 2021, its population is set to halve by the end of this century, productivity has been stagnant for more than a decade, and the national debt has reached 300 percent of GDP and is climbing fast. Disposable income averages barely $6,000 per person, and most workers lack even a high school education. China will remain Asia’s strongest state for the foreseeable future, but it does not possess the surplus wealth and power needed to dominate the world’s toughest region.

MORE POWER, MORE PROBLEMS

A one-sphere world is a gift to the United States, but it is also destabilizing. An international system with one effective sphere, several frustrated challengers, and large exposed regions does not produce a durable equilibrium. The same asymmetry that insulates and empowers Washington also distorts the incentives of adversaries, allies, and the United States itself in ways that invite conflict.

The first danger is that a one-sphere world will leave Russia and China unable to accept the status quo. Neither power has ever been more secure or more prosperous than it was in the post–Cold War era. But a one-sphere world threatens their status as great powers and the political monopolies that rule them.

Russia’s fundamental problem is that its former vassals are thriving without it. Since 1990, the ex-Soviet states that democratized and joined the European Union have grown more than twice as fast as Russia. Russians were about twice as rich as Poles were in 1990, whereas today Poles are roughly 70 percent richer than Russians. Ukraine’s westward turn would bring that arc of prosperity to Russia’s doorstep, and for Putin, that prospect is intolerable. A free and successful Ukraine would expose his rule as one presiding over national decline and prove that countries long treated as inferior can surpass Russia by embracing the very liberal order the Kremlin rejects.

China’s grievance runs along a different axis. Whereas Russia is threatened by the success of states that slipped its grasp, China is threatened by the structure of a one-sphere world. Lacking a sphere of its own, Beijing’s late-twentieth-century ascent depended on integration into the U.S.-led order. That strategy delivered extraordinary growth, but at a price: it bound China to an international system designed to prevent the emergence of new regional hegemons and to entrench open markets, open information, and enduring U.S. military primacy. What enabled China’s rise also constrained its expansion and threatened its political foundations.

From Beijing’s perspective, then, the U.S.-led order has always been a mixed bargain. The order restrained Japanese rearmament but entrenched a permanent U.S. military presence along China’s periphery. It kept sea-lanes open but froze Beijing’s claims to Taiwan and the East China and South China Seas. It enabled access to energy and raw materials from Africa and the Middle East but routed those flows through maritime chokepoints, such as the Strait of Malacca, policed by the U.S. Navy. More broadly, integration exposed China’s domestic population to foreign capital, information, legal norms, and economic volatility—eroding the Chinese Communist Party’s monopoly on power and deepening China’s dependence on Western demand, finance, and rules.

Chinese leaders believe they know where this path leads. The Soviet Union tried to reconcile its Communist Party rule with domestic liberalization and accommodation with the West—and lost both its regime and its empire. Xi has built his rule around that lesson. He is therefore willing to trade growth for control and integration for autonomy, embracing mercantilism, self-reliance, and bloc building, even at the cost of confrontation with the United States.

Alongside fear, however, there is also ambition. Russia and China are trying not merely to survive but to reverse historic loss. Great powers rarely accept demotion. Twentieth-century Germany and Japan had to be crushed before abandoning their empires, and France and the United Kingdom clung to theirs long after losing the capacity to sustain them. The Cold War was relatively stable in part because the Soviet Union was defending a vast territorial settlement won through victory in World War II.

Russia and China, by contrast, chafe against borders imposed through defeats and seek to overturn them. Both are heirs to Eurasian land empires with centuries of unified rule and a sense that regional primacy is a birthright. The Soviet implosion thus registered in Moscow not as a limited setback but, as Putin has argued, as the twentieth century’s chief geopolitical catastrophe. It ended Moscow’s control over roughly half the territory and population it once ruled and unleashed economic collapse alongside one of the sharpest peacetime declines in life expectancy on record, with male life expectancy plunging by six years in the early 1990s.

China’s grievance runs deeper still. During its “century of humiliation,” from 1839 to 1949, foreign powers defeated China in repeated wars, seized territory and set up treaty ports, imposed extraterritorial rule, and dismembered the Qing empire. Reversing those defeats—and making China whole again by reclaiming lost territory—sits at the core of the Communist Party’s nationalism. A one-sphere world stands in the way of those ambitions and thus risks fueling wars of restoration as imperial heirs mount increasingly dangerous bids to recover territory rather than accept permanent second-class standing.

Although Russia and China cannot steamroll their neighboring regions as Nazi Germany, imperial Japan, or the Soviet Union once did, they are more able to lash out around the world—including inside the United States itself. They lack regional empires but not global reach. Embedded in finance, supply chains, and communications networks, they can cripple economies through cyberattacks, degrade U.S. power by sabotaging satellites and undersea cables, fracture alliances through disinformation, and coerce countries by weaponizing chokepoints and nuclear threats. These tools allow pressure to accumulate and retaliation to spiral, raising the risk of catastrophic war. Russian and Chinese bids for regional hegemony may be doomed, but if deterrence fails, they remain capable of enormous destruction.

WAVERING WEST

Paradoxically, a one-sphere world makes it more likely that the United States will fail in some way to deter China or Russia. Secure at home, the United States enjoys wide latitude abroad. But that freedom breeds complacency. Eurasian threats feel distant, encouraging rhetorical defiance without the sustained military, economic, and industrial preparation needed to make deterrence credible.

The pattern is familiar. In the 1930s, the United States opposed German and Japanese expansion but outsourced enforcement to toothless international laws such as the Kellogg–Briand Pact, a treaty signed by various great powers in 1928 that outlawed war as a method of resolving international disputes. It also stayed out of the League of Nations, withdrew forces from Europe while enforcing war-debt payments that destabilized Germany, and abandoned naval rearmament in Asia even as it escalated sanctions on Japan. The result was provocation without deterrence, and eventually Pearl Harbor. After the Cold War, Washington repeated the same mistake with Russia. It expanded NATO to Russia’s borders, nearly doubling the alliance by admitting 12 new members, including former Soviet states, while cutting U.S. troop levels in Europe roughly in half. In 2008, it floated NATO membership for Georgia and Ukraine without extending credible security guarantees, antagonizing Russia without deterring it and helping set the stage for its wars with those countries.

At other moments, the United States has signaled indifference only to rush into war once foreign aggression revealed a region’s true importance. In 1949, for instance, Washington excluded South Korea from the U.S. defense perimeter and withdrew its troops, inviting North Korea’s invasion the following year. Washington then reversed course and engaged in a full-scale war on the Korean Peninsula. A similar pattern appeared in 1990, when the United States made little effort to deter Iraq’s Saddam Hussein from seizing Kuwait and then launched a major war to reverse his invasion.

Today, the United States is once again vacillating between retreat and resistance. At times, Washington implies that its vital interests lie only in the Western Hemisphere and that it might accommodate China and Russia beyond it. On other occasions, it sanctions Beijing and Moscow and arms their neighbors. That ambiguity is compounded by a lack of preparation. U.S. munitions would run out within weeks of the beginning of any major hot conflict, and its bases, satellites, and critical infrastructure remain dangerously exposed to Chinese and Russian cyber and missile attacks.

Russia and China lack regional empires but not global reach.

Most unsettling is how tempting it is, in a one-sphere world, for the United States to cash out of the order business altogether. Secure at home and facing no rival spheres abroad, Washington is allowing its alliances to slide toward protection rackets, its trade relationships toward trade wars, and major sea-lanes toward militarized zones. The institutions the United States once underwrote are fraying, and the markets it upheld are fragmenting. Some U.S. partners, including Canada and the United Kingdom, now look for short-term security wherever they can find it, even at the cost of long-term dependence on China. The result is not stability but the slow hollowing out of the relationships that once converted American dominance into a durable order.

None of this should inspire nostalgia for the old liberal order. Much of what Washington is now accused of dismantling was already broken. The World Trade Organization was hobbled well before its dispute-settlement system collapsed in 2019, having failed to discipline subsidies, industrial policy, and nontariff barriers—the very tools that now define economic competition. Arms control withered as China declined to join most regimes while quietly assembling the world’s largest missile force. Meanwhile, many U.S. allies, sheltered by American guarantees, cut defense spending, expanded welfare states, and grew dependent on Chinese markets and Russian energy. The order’s moral authority eroded as serial human rights abusers were routinely elected to the UN Human Rights Council and Western-backed institutions such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank funneled aid to repressive regimes. By integrating China and Russia into this hollowed-out system and granting them easy access to Western markets and technology, the United States empowered its most dangerous rivals.

As broken as the liberal order has become, however, the absence of order would be far worse. Anarchy does not produce peace or prosperity, but rather mercantilism, arms races, and war. The question, then, is not whether the United States should support an international order but whether it can help rebuild one fit for the world that now exists.

TOUGH LOVE

A one-sphere world carries dangers, but it also gives the United States a rare chance to reset the international order from a position of historic strength. The removal of Maduro showed what that strength can achieve. In hours, Washington toppled a destructive narco-kleptocrat, shut down a hub for sanctions evasion, and punctured the myth of Chinese and Russian reach in the Western Hemisphere. It also revealed the authoritarian axis for what it is: a loose coalition bound by resentment, not by values or mutual defense. Most important, the episode showed that U.S. military power still works. Deterrence begins with perception, and perception comes from proof. In a world drifting toward disorder, the competent use of force has outsize effects, shaping the calculations of adversaries contemplating aggression and of allies deciding how, and with whom, to secure their future.

Trump squandered part of that advantage by provoking an unnecessary showdown over Greenland and pushing major partners to hedge rather than close ranks. Canada now touts a “strategic partnership” with China. The United Kingdom is reengaging Beijing economically while agreeing in principle to transfer sovereignty over Diego Garcia, a British colonial territory in the Indian Ocean that hosts a critical U.S. military base, to Mauritius, injecting uncertainty into a cornerstone of Western Indo-Pacific power projection. It has also approved the construction of a massive new Chinese embassy in London atop sensitive communications infrastructure. France, meanwhile, is courting Chinese investment in the name of “strategic autonomy.”

Yet even as these rear-area partners rehearse Western decline from a distance, a more resilient free world is taking shape in the places where great-power war would likely be fought. Defense spending among European NATO members has increased by more than half since 2019, concentrated in countries along Europe’s eastern flank facing Russia. In East Asia, the first island chain, the collection of countries surrounding China’s eastern coast, is hardening into a forward line of deterrence as Japan rearms and acquires long-range strike forces, Taiwan extends conscription and stockpiles munitions, and the Philippines reopens U.S. bases. Australia is also undertaking the largest peacetime military buildup in its history.

This rearmament is being reinforced economically. Europe has slashed its dependence on Russian energy, cutting Russia’s share of EU gas imports from over 40 percent before the war to well under 20 percent today while banning coal and embargoing most Russian oil. Japan and South Korea have sharply curtailed new manufacturing investment in China. Japan and the Netherlands now block exports of advanced chipmaking equipment to Beijing, while France and Germany are tightening scrutiny of Chinese acquisitions in ports, power grids, and telecom networks. Manufacturing tied to U.S. demand is increasingly flowing to India, Mexico, and Vietnam rather than China’s coastal hubs. Trade with China remains sizable, but capital, technology, and control over supply chains are starting to move elsewhere.

The United States is once again vacillating between retreat and resistance.

The central task of U.S. foreign policy should be to consolidate this patchwork of responses into a durable alliance. Washington should reaffirm its security guarantees for partners that meet clear standards—sustained defense spending, expanded munitions production, and assured access for U.S. forces—while conditioning preferential access to U.S. markets, capital, and technology on strict limits to Chinese investment and technology transfer and on continued restrictions on Russian energy exports. These commitments could be reinforced through allied co-production, long-term procurement contracts, and shared stockpiles that lock in supply-chain shifts away from Russia and China. The result would be a hardened frontline that increases pressure on both Russia and China, cutting Moscow off from energy rents, constraining Beijing’s access to Western technology and export markets, and offering neighboring states credible alternatives to subordination.

In the absence of U.S. support, however, these efforts would remain fragmented and reversible. Some states would fail to rearm and others would hedge, investing in narrow self-defense rather than contributing meaningfully to a wider coalition. Moscow and Beijing would exploit these gaps, isolating and pressuring neighbors one by one. Western economies might shift some production out of China, but they would deepen trade in other sectors and pursue competing industrial strategies, splintering supply chains rather than binding them together. Over time, higher costs, electoral churn, and persistent Russian and Chinese coercion through trade retaliation, energy leverage, and political interference would erode support for economic disengagement and military coordination. By contrast, if the United States anchors allied efforts—backing partners that commit forces, territory, and industrial capacity to shared defense—it could consolidate a coalition with the power to blunt Russian and Chinese campaigns of intimidation, subversion, and territorial conquest.

In this emerging system, the Western Hemisphere is not merely a buffer but the United States’ home base. Despite persistent violence, corruption, and migration pressures, the hemisphere remains a coherent political and economic community—capitalist, broadly democratic, and historically resistant to Old World empires. It is richer, more populous, more urban, and more institutionally developed than at any point in its history, and more closely aligned with the United States than it has been in decades. Anti-American sentiment has not disappeared, but the interests of regional powers are converging when it comes to security, economic growth, and wariness of China. Taken together, these conditions give the hemisphere the depth and resilience to serve as the secure foundation of a global democratic order.

Whether this advantage endures will depend on the ability of the United States to avoid the central error made by Russia and China: treating neighbors and partners as wards rather than as allies. Closed, coercive spheres breed resistance and decay; open spheres built on centrality compound power by drawing others in. The United States already sits at the hub of Western finance, trade, migration, technology, and security networks. It need not dominate the Western Hemisphere by force as long as it remains the market others cannot replace, the currency others cannot escape, and the security provider no rival can match.

The central question of the coming era is not whether other spheres may someday form—an unlikely prospect—but whether the United States, as the only power that already possesses one, can use its dominance to sustain order rather than merely exploit advantage. On that choice will turn not only the fate of American primacy but also the future of the international system.

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