Spheres by Default

REBECCA LISSNER is Senior Fellow for U.S. Foreign Policy and Director of the Future of American Strategy initiative at the Council on Foreign Relations. She served as Deputy Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy National Security Adviser to the Vice President during the Biden administration. MIRA RAPP-HOOPER is a Visiting Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. She was Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for East Asia and Oceania and Director for Indo-Pacific Strategy at the U.S. National Security Council during the Biden administration. They are the authors of An Open World: How America Can Win the Contest for Twenty-First-Century Order. How U.S. Concessions Are Quietly Becoming Chinese Influence Since U.S. President Donald Trump took office last January, analysts have debated whether he is pursuing a sphere of influence strategy—an approach by which great powers divide the world into privileged blocs, with little concern for the interests or preferences of the smaller states that those blocs subsume. In the affirmative view, the Trump administration is laying claim to the Western Hemisphere—including through military and influence campaigns in Venezuela and Cuba—while leaving China to expand its political, military, and economic influence in Asia. Yet the lavish but substantively modest summit between Trump and Chinese leader Xi Jinping held this week delivered no such arrangement. Trump did not definitively sell out Taiwan or other U.S. Indo-Pacific allies while in Beijing, which was both a relief and an affirming outcome for those who reject the spheres of influence approach. Both sides of this debate, however, rely on an outdated conception of what it means for great powers to divvy up the globe. In the twenty-first century, spheres of influence can emerge not only as forms of military and geographic dominance, as they did in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but also in critical technology or infrastructure domains. Moreover, such spheres need not come about through explicit agreement—they can come about by default. Seen in these terms, a Chinese sphere in Asia is very much still possible. And it becomes even more likely as Trump considers concessions to Xi. For instance, after the summit, when Trump was asked about U.S. arms sales to Taiwan, Trump said that he would “make a determination over the next fairly short period,” and later referred to the Taiwan arms deal as a “very good negotiating chip.” Trump has made such unilateral concessions to Xi before: in December 2025, for example, he cleared the sale of Nvidia’s advanced H200 chips to major Chinese companies, despite national security concerns among many analysts that this would only advantage China’s artificial intelligence development. Continued concessions on U.S. policy in Asia could hasten the arrival of a Chinese sphere in the Pacific, particularly as Washington’s strategic distraction intensifies. The United States has a great deal to lose if such a sphere emerges, whether by design or by default. On the economic front, Washington’s AI advantages could wane, and China could become emboldened to try to change the status of Taiwan through coercion. And far from creating a pacifying balance of power, such a division could actually raise the risk of a titanic clash between Beijing and Washington in a few years’ time. There is ample precedent for great powers divvying up the world. At key moments in history, when the terms of geopolitics were heavily contested, new power balances emerged through negotiation. After the Napoleonic wars, Austria, France, Great Britain, Prussia, and Russia created the Concert of Europe, agreeing to political boundaries designed to maintain a continental equilibrium and thereby prevent war. More than a century later, after the cataclysms of the two world wars, the leaders of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States met in Yalta to determine the postwar divisions of Germany and Europe—a model many have invoked when raising the question of whether Trump will attempt some such great-power condominium with Xi, whereby the United States and China give each other a wider berth in their respective regions. Yet a bargain resembling either of these historical models is neither realistic nor consonant with Trump’s actual foreign policy. Far from retreating to the Western Hemisphere or investing to consolidate the United States’ position there, as A. Wess Mitchell recently advocated in Foreign Affairs, the president started a war with Iran that has metastasized into an open-ended military adventure in the Middle East. In Europe, despite spasmodic diplomacy, Washington has proved unwilling to impose an unfavorable deal on Ukraine or to otherwise grant Russia the inroads it seeks on the continent. Notwithstanding the administration’s strategy documents and professions of prioritization, the president remains engaged around the world, albeit on his own terms, and

Spheres by Default

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