Ceding regional leadership to China causes nuclear war

Allison is one of several analysts who have recently advanced the argument that the United States should make a virtue of necessity—that it should accept Russian and Chinese spheres of influence, encompassing some portion of eastern Europe and the western Pacific, as the price of stability and peace. The logic is twofold: first, to create a cleaner separation between contending parties by clearly marking where one’s influence ends and the other’s begins; and second, to reduce the chances of conflict by giving rising or resurgent powers a safe zone along their borders. In theory, this seems like a reasonable way of preventing competition from turning into outright conflict, especially given that countries such as Taiwan and the Baltic states lie thousands of miles from the United States but on the doorsteps of its rivals. Yet in reality, a spheres-of-influence world would bring more peril than safety.

Russia’s and China’s spheres of influence would inevitably be domains of coercion and authoritarianism. Both countries are run by illiberal, autocratic regimes; their leaders see democratic values as profoundly threatening to their political survival. If Moscow and Beijing dominated their respective neighborhoods, they would naturally seek to undermine democratic governments that resist their control—as China is already doing in Taiwan and as Russia is doing in Ukraine—or that challenge, through their very existence, the legitimacy of authoritarian rule. The practical consequence of acceding to authoritarian spheres of influence would be to intensify the crisis of democracy that afflicts the world today.

The United States would suffer economically, too. China, in particular, is a mercantilist power already working to turn Asian economies toward Beijing and could one day put the United States at a severe disadvantage on the world’s most economically dynamic continent. Washington should not concede a Chinese sphere of influence unless it is also willing to compromise the “Open Door” principles that have animated its statecraft for over a century.

Such costs might be acceptable in exchange for peace and security. But spheres of influence during the Cold War did not prevent the Soviets from repeatedly testing American redlines in Berlin, causing high-stakes crises in which nuclear war was a real possibility. Nor did those spheres prevent the two sides from competing sharply, and sometimes violently, throughout the “Third World.” Throughout history, spheres-of-influence settlements, from the Thirty Years’ Peace between Athens and Sparta to the Peace of Amiens between the United Kingdom and Napoleonic France have often ended, sooner or later, in war.

The idea that spheres of influence are a formula for peace rests on assumptions that often go unexamined: that revisionist powers are driven primarily by insecurity, that their grievances are limited and can be easily satisfied, that the truly vital interests of competing powers do not conflict, and that creative statecraft can therefore fashion an enduring, mutually acceptable equilibrium. The trouble is that these premises don’t always hold. Ideology and the quest for greatness—not simply insecurity—often drive great powers. Rising states are continually tempted to renegotiate previous bargains once they have the power to do so. Offering concessions to a revisionist state may simply convince it that the existing order is fragile and can be tested further. Conceding a sphere of influence to a great-power challenger might not produce stability but simply give that challenger a better position from which to realize its ambitions.

Consider the situation in the western Pacific. The most minimal Chinese sphere of influence would surely include Taiwan. Yet if Taiwan became a platform for Chinese military capabilities, the defense of other U.S. allies in the region, such as Japan and the Philippines, would become vastly more difficult. Nor would such a concession likely satisfy Chinese ambitions. A growing body of literature by scholars such as Toshi Yoshihara, James Holmes, Liza Tobin, and Elizabeth Economy suggests that China desires at the very least to push the United States beyond the chain of islands running from Japan to Taiwan to the Philippines. Even a limited Chinese sphere in the western Pacific would serve as a springboard to this larger objective.