Spheres of Influence

Venezuela and the end of Pax Americana

Nearly a year ago, I heard an American woman tell a large room full of people that the recently inaugurated US president was going to bring about world peace. Implying that she had special links to the new administration, she explained that Trump, Putin and Xi Jin Ping were going to divide the planet into three spheres of influence. The US would control the Western hemisphere, China would control Asia, Russia would control Europe. A pact between the three great powers would then prevent future war.

This same woman also repeated several conspiracy theories, among them the Russian claim, repeatedly debunked, that the U.S. had biological weapons factories in Ukraine. For that reason, I didn’t believe anything she said. But I did take her seriously. She had spent time inside the information bubble jointly created by Russian propagandists and their MAGA counterparts, and she was repeating stories she had heard there.

That vision, of a world divided into three spheres of influence, run by three great powers, has been kicking around for some time, mostly promoted by Russians who want to exaggerate the strength of their weak economy and justify their bloody war in Ukraine. But as I just wrote in the Atlantic, this idea influences some in the Trump administration now too:

Back in 2019, Fiona Hill, a National Security Council official in the first Trump administration, testified to a House committee that Russians pushing the creation of spheres of influence had been offering to somehow “swap” Venezuela, their closest ally in Latin America, for Ukraine. Since then, the notion that international relations should promote great-power dominance, not universal values or networks of allies, has spread from Moscow to Washington. The administration’s new national-security strategy outlines a plan to dominate the Americas, enigmatically describing U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere as “Enlist and Expand,” and downplaying threats from China and Russia. Trump has also issued threats to Denmark, Panama, and Canada, all allies whose sovereignty we now challenge.

These ideas place the capture of the Venezuelan president in a new context. Even though the the military raid that took Nicolás Maduro into custody does resemble some past American actions, especially the ouster of the Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega in 1989–90, the use of this new language to explain the Venezuelan raid makes the story very different.

At his press conference on Saturday, Trump did not use the word democracy. He did not refer to international law. Instead, he presented a garbled version of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, a policy originally designed to keep foreign imperial powers out of the Americas, calling it something that sounded like the “Donroe Document”: “Under our new National Security Strategy,” he said, reading from prepared remarks, “American dominance in the Western Hemisphere will never be questioned again.”

As I wrote in my recent book, Autocracy Inc, Nicolas Maduro was an extraordinarily corrupt, venal, and repressive leader. He was supported by Russian, Chinese, Cuban and Iranian money and weapons. He stayed in power by jailing, killing and exiling his opponents. A case could have been made, not only to Congress but to America’s allies and Venezuela’s neighbors, that his removal would restore democracy to his country and stability to the region. But this is not what the Trump administration chose to do.

Instead, Trump has gone out of his way to portray the capture of Maduro as nothing more than a “win,” for the US president and for US oil companies (who were also not consulted before the raid). On Saturday, Trump patronized and verbally dismissed the leader of the Venezuelan opposition, Maria Corina Machado (a compelling, dedicated woman, whom I interviewed in December 2024). His administration has half-heartedly justified the raid by indicting Maduro for drug trafficking. Given that Trump himself just pardoned the former president of Honduras, who was indicted on drug charges six years ago, this hardly fits into a broader logic.

But it the would-be dominators of the Western Hemisphere have no need for logic:

If might makes right, if the U.S. gets to do what it wants using any tools it wants in its own sphere, then there is no need for transparency, democracy, or legitimacy. The concerns of ordinary people who live in smaller nations don’t need to be taken into account, because they will not be granted any agency. Their interests are not the concern of the imperial companies that want their mineral resources, or the imperial leaders who need the propaganda of conquest to keep power at home.

This is a criminally short-sighted policy. For seventy years, American prosperity and influence have been based on a network of allies who worked with us, not because they were coerced, but because they shared our values. Now those allies will begin to hedge:

Trump’s pursuit of an illusory sphere of influence is unlikely to bring us peace or prosperity—any more than the invasion of Ukraine brought peace and prosperity to Russians—and this might become clear sooner than anyone expects. If America is just a regional bully, after all, then our former allies in Europe and Asia will close their doors and their markets to us. Sooner or later, “our” Western Hemisphere will organize against us and fight back. Far from making us more powerful, the pursuit of American dominance will make us weaker, eventually leaving us with no sphere, and no influence, at all.

Trump and his henchmen will also eventually discover that Venezuelans do have agency. They might even discover that Americans don’t like their expensive, well-trained military being used to replace one dictator with another, for the benefit of Trump’s oil-industry donors. On Saturday afternoon, a few hours after the US military took Nicolas Maduro into custody, I discussed these topics with with my Atlantic colleague, David Frum:

Read a transcript here

Read the whole Atlantic article here, with this gift link

Or…read about the cartoon at the top of this substack. Drawn by James Gillray in 1805, it shows Napoleon and William Pitt, then British Prime Minister, carving up the world…

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Is Greenland Next?

The American military action in Venezuela has created a wave of anxiety across Europe, and especially in Denmark. In part, this is thanks to comments Trump made to my colleague, Michael Scherer: “But we do need Greenland, absolutely. We need it for defense,” Trump said during a phone call on Sunday. On Monday, Stephen Miller, Trump’s Homeland Security Advisor, told CNN that the US would take Greenland because no one would fight for it. Greenland is technically part of the Western hemisphere, and thus presumably part of what the Trump administration imagines to be its sphere of influence too. But here is the strange thing: Greenland is already in the American sphere of influnce. I was in Denmark exactly a year ago, in January 2025, and wrote about the shock caused by what seemed, to the Danes, an American policy of Kafkaesque absurdity:

In truth, Trump’s demands are illogical. Anything that the U.S. theoretically might want to do in Greenland is already possible, right now. Denmark has never stopped the U.S. military from building bases, searching for minerals, or stationing troops in Greenland, or from patrolling sea lanes nearby. In the past, the Danes have even let Americans defy Danish policy in Greenland. Over lunch, one former Danish diplomat told me a Cold War story, which unfolded not long after Denmark had formally declared itself to be a nuclear-free country. In 1957, the U.S. ambassador nevertheless approached Denmark’s then–prime minister, H. C. Hansen, with a request. The United States was interested in storing some nuclear weapons at an American base in Greenland. Would Denmark like to be notified?

Hansen responded with a cryptic note, which he characterized, according to diplomatic records, as “informal, personal, highly secret and limited to one copy each on the Danish and American side.” In the note, which was not shared with the Danish Parliament or the Danish press, and indeed was not made public at all until the 1990s, Hansen said that since the U.S. ambassador had not mentioned specific plans or made a concrete request, “I do not think your remarks give rise to any comment from my side.” In other words, If you don’t tell us that you are keeping nuclear weapons in Greenland, then we won’t have to object.

The worst part, several Danes told me, was that Trump could not articulate, even in private conversations with the Danish prime minister, exactly why he needs to own Greenland. Many had concluded that the true explanation was optical: Trump just wants the U.S. to look larger on a map.

Americans would pay a high price for Trump’s whimsical obsession with the Mercator projection. Greenland is Danish territory. Its inhabitants are Danish citizens who vote in Danish elections. Denmark is a founding member of NATO and a longstanding US ally. Danish companies have huge American investments, and vice versa. Any attempt to invade or coerce Greenland, or to forcibly turn Greenlanders into Americans, would break even more precedents than the recent raid on Venezuela, with consequences lasting decades. This is a disaster Congress must stop before it begins.

The Kleptocracy Tracker returns next week

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Greetings to all from the Polish countryside….

we had a few days of snow