30 «¬® ̄°±² ³««³°® ́GRAHAM ALLISON is Douglas Dillon
Professor of Government at the Harvard
Kennedy School and the author of Destined for
War: Can America and China Escape
Thucydides’s Trap?American sphere. Spheres o inuence
had given way to a sphere o inuence.
The strong still imposed their will on
the weak; the rest o the world was
compelled to play largely by American
rules, or else face a steep price, from
crippling sanctions to outright regime
change. Spheres o inuence hadn’t
gone away; they had been collapsed
into one, by the overwhelming fact o
U.S. hegemony.
Now, however, that hegemony is
fading, and Washington has awakened
to what it calls “a new era o great-
power competition,” with China and
Russia increasingly using their power to
assert interests and values that often
conict with those o the United States.
But American policymakers and ana-
lysts are still struggling to come to grips
with what this new era means for the
U.S. role in the world. Going forward,
that role will not only be dierent; it
will also be signi¥cantly diminished.
While leaders will continue announcing
grand ambitions, diminished means will
mean diminished results.
Unipolarity is over, and with it the
illusion that other nations would simply
take their assigned place in a U.S.-led
international order. For the United
States, that will require accepting the
reality that there are spheres o inu-
ence in the world today—and that not
all o them are American spheres.THE WORLD AS IT WAS
Before making pronouncements about
the new rules o geopolitics, post–Cold
War U.S. secretaries o state should
have looked back to the ¥nal months o
World War II, when U.S. policymakers
were similarly resistant to accepting a
world in which spheres o inuenceThe New Spheres
of Influence
Sharing the Globe With
Other Great PowersGraham Allison
I
n the heady aftermath o the Cold
War, American policymakers
pronounced one o the fundamental
concepts o geopolitics obsolete.
Secretary o State Condoleezza Rice
described a new world “in which great
power is de¥ned not by spheres o
inuence... or the strong imposing
their will on the weak.” Secretary o
State Hillary Clinton declared that “the
United States does not recognize spheres
o inuence.” Secretary o State John
Kerry proclaimed that “the era o the
Monroe Doctrine is over,” ending
almost two centuries o the United
States staking claim to its own sphere o
inuence in the Western Hemisphere.
Such pronouncements were right in
that something about geopolitics had
changed. But they were wrong about
what exactly it was. U.S. policymakers
had ceased to recognize spheres o
inuence—the ability o other powers
to demand deference from other states
in their own regions or exert predomi-
nant control there—not because the
concept had become obsolete. Rather,
the entire world had become a de factoCOME
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