The West must deny Russia its ‘sphere of influence’

Andreas Kluth

We have been here countless times in history. Once again, diplomats from great and antagonistic powers meet to decide the fate of nations that do not even sit at the table. Some hope to avoid war. Others are betting that war, or the threat of it, is a fair price to pay to secure their country’s “sphere of influence.”

Such a sphere, a geopolitical zone of control for the exclusion of rivals, is what the Russian president, Vladimir Putin, demanded once again in two draft treaties he published last month: one was directed at the United States, the other at the OTAN. Together, these amount to blackmailing the entire “West” and mocking what remains of the rules-based international order. Grant me my fief, he says, or I attack.

Putin wants commitments that NATO will never, ever admit Ukraine or any other country in the region as a member, regardless of the preferences of the nation in question. And, in effect, it demands that the alliance demilitarize countries already within NATO, but that previously belonged to the Soviet Union, such as Estonia or Latvia, among others.

If that sounds understandable to some pundits, that’s because for most of history it was the default mindset. As Thucydides described, competing spheres of influence pitted Athens and Sparta against each other for 27 years. Later rivalries started the Punic Wars between Carthage and Rome (initially over the island of Sicily), and many other conflicts throughout the centuries.

From the point of view of Moscow or Beijing, the countries that today are considered the West are therefore hypocrites, because it was they who elevated this approach to world politics to an art form.

Early US foreign policy was based on the Monroe Doctrine, which stated that the European powers had to stay away from the “new world” because that was the US’s hemisphere. The European powers, in turn, they happily divided all of Africa and much of Asia. The first treaties explicitly referring to “spheres of influence” were signed between the UK and Germany when they partitioned the Gulf of Guinea in the 1880s.

In the 20th century, the habit became malignant. In 1939, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, in the secret Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, divided Eastern Europe between them. His victims: Finland, Estonia and Latvia (assigned to Joseph Stalin’s sphere), Lithuania (initially in Adolf Hitler’s), Poland (shared between the two), etc. Today, many of these nations are anxious again.

During the Cold War, the entire globe was divided into just two spheres of influence. But simultaneously, a project was born that eventually became the European Union. This new confederation, built on the ruins of old Europe, was defined as a rebuke to the odious power politics of yesteryear. As idealists of all time, these Europeans dreamed of an order in which the big ones (such as Germany or France) cannot dominate the small ones (such as Luxembourg or Malta), and where authority is derived from the rules and not from the brute force.

After the Cold War ended, Americans embraced that aspiration as well. “Power is not defined by spheres of influence … or by the strong imposing their will on the weak,” said former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Even pre-Putin, post-Soviet Moscow seemed to subscribe to the ideal. NATO and Russia They seek “a common space of security and stability, without dividing lines or spheres of influence that limit the sovereignty of any State,” reads a joint declaration of the two in 1997.

In retrospect, those words sound like a more innocent, or perhaps more naïve, time. International relations scholars today think that Americans, Europeans, and others, at best, imagined that spheres of influence thinking could be superseded. Actually, for a brief moment in history, there was only one sphere, and it was American. Any rule-based order needs policing by a so-called hegemony.

The coming weeks, months and years will tell whether the world is headed for another era of “realpolitik” or whether supremacy is destined to return to the amoral and cynical approach to international relations that reduces small countries to pawns on the chessboard. of the great powers.

Is the South China Sea worth dying for if China tries to take it over? What will happen to Ukraine, Moldova or Estonia, if Putin decides to invade them? The great powers of the West may still decide to let them go. But they should have no illusions about what kind of world they would be giving up, and what kind of world they would get instead.