"I define a sphere of influence as a geographic region where one powerful state seeks to dominate the foreign policy orientations of weaker states within the region and also to exclude other great powers from significantly intervening in that territory." - Dr. Lindsey O'Rourke [00:02:06]
"This is a concept that quote should be relegated to the dust bin of history." - Antony Blinken (quoted by Dr. Lindsey O'Rourke) [00:06:51]
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"The process of getting a nuclear bomb proliferation is a very dangerous time... but once you actually have a stable second strike capability, the same nuclear weapons become a force for peace... I find spheres kind of follow a similar process." - Dr. Lindsey O'Rourke [00:24:12]
"Putin acted in Ukraine in response to a client state that was about to slip out of his grasp... Ukraine, which is a non-NATO country, is going to be vulnerable to military domination by Russia no matter what we do." - Barack Obama (quoted by Dr. Lindsey O'Rourke) [00:47:02]
"For decades countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order... We knew the story of an international rule-based order was partially false... This bargain no longer holds." - Mark Carney (quoted by Dr. Lindsey O'Rourke) [00:52:59]
"Being a happy vassal is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else." - Alexander De Croo (quoted by Dr. Lindsey O'Rourke) [00:53:30]
Speakers & Credentials
Dr. Lindsey O'Rourke – Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at Boston College. She is a leading expert in International Relations theory, US foreign policy, international security, and military strategy, and the author of Covert Regime Change: America's Secret Cold War.
Jenna – Representative from the ONDISC platform at the University of Notre Dame, serving as the event host and moderator.
1. Executive Summary
The core thesis of the briefing is that spheres of influence are not antiquated anomalies to be discarded, but structural imperatives embedded within an anarchic international system that great powers inevitably pursue to maximize security, economic resilience, and political alignment [00:09:28].
The Washington consensus suffers from a significant analytical blind spot, publicly condemning foreign spheres of influence as illegal and regressive while covertly and overtly expanding its own regional and global order since the framing of the Monroe Doctrine [00:10:01].
Spheres of influence operate along a distinct life cycle; the creation phase is highly volatile, dangerous, and prone to revisionist conflicts or nationalist resistance, whereas fully established and recognized spheres operate paradoxically as robust anchors of international stability and great-power peace [00:22:57].
Modern geopolitical flashpoints in Ukraine and Taiwan are structural crises of "contestation," where incomplete boundaries and a refusal to acknowledge competing strategic depths have forced kinetic collisions [00:04:44].
Over-reliance on coercive sticks rather than collaborative carrots by contemporary US administrations risks inducing systemic fragility, generating deep nationalist backlash among long-standing allies, and accelerating a global pivot toward competing architectural offers from powers like China [00:52:26].
Defining the Architecture of Spheres of Influence [00:02:01]
The Washington Consensus and the American Blind Spot [00:05:21]
Realist Underpinnings: Why Great Powers Seek Spheres [00:14:19]
The Life Cycle of Spheres: From Contestation to Peace [00:22:38]
The Mechanics of Sphere Building: Sticks, Carrots, and Narratives [00:25:53]
Predicting Challenges: Disruptive Capacity and Strategic Interest [00:28:26]
Historical Precedents of Great Power Stability [00:33:55]
Pathways to Structural Decay and Breakdown [00:36:55]
Deep Dive: The Geopolitical Collision Over Ukraine [00:38:37]
The Strategic Realism of the Trump and Biden Eras [00:46:48]
Policy Prescriptions for Ukraine and the Western Alliance [00:51:29]
Audience Q&A: Covert Action, Imperialism, and Global Perception [00:54:09]
Audience Q&A: Distinguishing Regional Hegemony from Spheres [00:58:31]
Audience Q&A: The Economics of Hierarchy and Strategic Spirals [01:20:47]
3. Detailed Thematic Summary
Conceptual Foundations: Defining the Sphere of Influence
A sphere of influence is structurally delineated as an explicit or implicit geographic region where a dominant great power exerts primary influence over the foreign policy orientations of subordinate states, while successfully excluding external great powers from significant strategic interventions [00:02:06].
Crucially, subordinate states within a properly defined sphere retain nominal domestic sovereignty, distinguishing the architecture from traditional colonial empires where direct administrative governance is imposed [00:04:16].
While any state can unilaterally assert a sphere, true structural realization requires systemic acquiescence or deterrence, forcing external great powers to respect red lines such as refusing to form military alliances or build bases in the region [00:02:31].
An area where a power attempts to carve out exclusive influence but faces active pushback from rival states is classified as a contested region; historical examples include the pre-World War I Balkans and modern-day Ukraine and Taiwan [00:04:44].
The Washington Consensus and the American Blind Spot
Modern US foreign policy rhetoric maintains a unified consensus that foreign spheres of influence are fundamentally regressive, authoritarian concepts that violate international law and belong in the dust bin of history [00:05:37].
This worldview is historically contradicted by American actions; the United States has continuously pursued its own exclusive regional sphere since the introduction of the Monroe Doctrine in 1823 [00:10:18].
Following World War II, this regional footprint expanded globally into Western Europe and East Asia via military occupations and institutionalized security frameworks like NATO [00:10:42].
The post-Cold War era of unipolarity created a strategic mirage where the global expansion of a singular American sphere was mislabeled as a universal rules-based international order [00:11:15].
Recent policy shifts under the Trump administration have broken with standard rhetoric by openly invoking the Monroe Doctrine via the modern "Trump Corollary," explicitly warning external powers out of the Western Hemisphere while continuing to deny the legitimacy of Russian or Chinese spheres [00:08:13].
Structural Realism: The Drivers of Sphere Acquisition
Within an anarchic, self-help international system, territory remains a vital currency of power because states can extract strategic depth, security assets, and material wealth from geographical spaces [00:14:34].
Dr. O'Rourke identifies nine historical great powers since 1815 using Correlates of War data, demonstrating that every single one attempted to construct a sphere of influence to survive structural competition [00:22:02].
Great powers are driven to acquire spheres by clear security imperatives: the creation of physical buffer zones to avoid shared borders with main rivals, the acquisition of forward defense capabilities, and the deployment of force multipliers through mutual security pacts [00:16:12].
Strategically, spheres operate under a regional stabilizer mechanism, acting as an internal pacifier where the dominant power suppresses localized conflicts among weaker states in its orbit to avoid secondary escalations [00:18:00].
Economically, spheres allow powers to structure regional economic rules to their own advantage, secure resilient supply chains through friend-shoring, lock in access to critical technology markets, and project monetary hegemony through currency dollarization [00:18:53].
Politically, these architectures codify predictable patron-client relationships, which is demonstrated empirically by global voting alignments where subordinate states reliably mirror their patrons' positions within the United Nations [00:20:30].
The Life Cycle of Spheres: Contestation, Stabilization, and Decay
Spheres of influence do not exist as static entities; they progress through a cyclical lifecycle moving from an initial contested region, stabilizing into an established sphere, and eventually suffering structural breakdown back into open contestation [00:22:57].
The creation phase is a dangerous two-level game requiring a great power to establish internal compliance through a balance of coercion and co-optation, while externally displacing competing powers via defensive deterrence [00:24:56].
Dr. O'Rourke constructs a unique structural typology predicting whether an external rival will actively challenge a rising sphere based on two key variables: disruptive capacity and core strategic interest [00:28:26].
High capacity coupled with deep strategic interest yields open contestation, whereas an asymmetry in these variables creates a cold peace marked by the grudging tolerance of an opponent's boundaries, as seen during the Cold War division of Europe [00:31:31].
Paradoxically, fully established spheres parallel the stabilizing mechanics of nuclear weapons; though the pathway to proliferation is violent, a completed arrangement acts as a force for peace by drawing unmistakable red lines and checking miscalculations [00:24:12].
Inevitably, spheres break down through three structural pathways: internal erosion of the carrot-and-stick bargain, macro shifts in structural disruptive capacity, or a re-evaluation of long-term strategic interests [00:36:55].
Deep Historical Precedents: The Concert of Europe and Cold War Detente
The historical record demonstrates that explicit sphere-partitioning agreements are highly effective mechanisms for long-term geopolitical stability [00:33:55].
Following the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the Concert of Europe mapped out clear, distinct regional parameters across the continent among major empires, maintaining a durable great power peace with static borders spanning from 1815 to 1859 [00:33:58].
During the Cold War, the stabilization of the European theater was fundamentally secured through a tacit and later explicit understanding of the Iron Curtain boundary, culminating in the mid-Cold War era of detente under Nixon and Kissinger [00:34:08].
This mutual recognition of structural red lines systematically averted direct military collisions, checked destabilizing miscalculations, and allowed for the codification of historic arms control treaties [00:34:37].
Conversely, when Kaiser Wilhelm II abandoned Bismarck's highly calibrated regional balance-of-power diplomacy, Germany's aggressive expansion unraveled the established sphere boundaries, destabilizing the system and causing World War I [00:37:38].
Case Study Analysis: The Macro Dynamics of the Ukraine War
The modern kinetic war in Ukraine is fundamentally analyzed as a direct structural collision resulting from a decades-long competition over spheres of influence in the post-Cold War power vacuum [00:38:58].
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States deployed its "Engagement and Enlargement" doctrine, investing 5 billion dollars from 1991 to 2004 to integrate Eastern European nations into Western democratic institutions, the European Union, and NATO [00:39:25, 00:43:14].
Concurrently, Russia attempted to counter this expansion by constructing its own parallel architecture, deploying energy subsidies, intervening in regional elections, and creating institutions like the Eurasian Customs Union (later Eurasian Economic Union) and the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) [00:40:15].
This structural friction caused consecutive domestic crises within Ukraine: the 2004 Orange Revolution, the flashpoint 2008 Bucharest Declaration asserting future NATO membership, and the 2014 Euromaidan revolution [00:42:35].
Russia's subsequent annexation of Crimea in 2014 structurally backfired by removing 12% of the pro-Russian electorate from future Ukrainian national votes, accelerating a domestic pivot toward Western alignment [00:45:23].
The crisis reached its ultimate flashpoint under the Biden administration via the November 2021 US-Ukraine Charter on Strategic Partnership, prompting Russia to deliver an ultimatum demanding a halt to NATO expansion [00:48:13]. The complete rejection of these parameters by the West triggered the 2022 invasion [00:49:25].
Modern Geopolitical Realities and Policy Prescriptions
On the contemporary battlefield, Russia maintains control over roughly 20% of Ukrainian territory, leveraging a stark 100-million-person demographic advantage over Ukraine to execute a slow, costly war of attrition [00:50:37].
As a consequence of this attrition, Ukrainian public opinion has steadily shifted, with a 2025 Gallup poll revealing that 69% of Ukrainians now support pursuing a negotiated settlement to end the hostilities [00:51:16].
Dr. O'Rourke advocates for a realistic sphere settlement patterned after the 1955 Austrian State Treaty, which would mandate total Ukrainian military neutrality while preserving its domestic democratic sovereignty and economic independence [00:51:36].
Regarding the Western alliance, she issues a stark warning that current US foreign policy relies too heavily on unilateral coercion rather than mutual benefits, alienating core allies [00:52:26].
This architectural heavy-handedness has significantly degraded global trust, prompting international polls to reflect a dangerous trend where global favorability for Chinese leadership is beginning to outpace that of the United States [00:53:47].
The Reference Vault
4. Data & Figures
Data Point
Value
Context
Timestamp
Historical Great Powers Evaluated
9 States
Total number of states rising to great power status since 1815 analyzed via the Correlates of War project dataset.
This structural model traces geopolitical architectures through a predictable evolutionary arc: moving from an open, un-demarcated contested region, transforming into an established and stabilized sphere, and ultimately experiencing macro-decay that routes the system back into open competition [00:22:57]. In contemporary international relations, this explains why the end of unipolarity was not a permanent victory but merely a temporary pause; the post-Cold War collapse of the Soviet footprint created a structural vacuum in Eastern Europe that inevitably pulled both Western expansion and Russian revisionism into a dangerous competitive dynamic. Great powers are pulled into these architectures by the system itself, making the absolute elimination of spheres a theoretical impossibility.
The Proliferation Stability Paradox
Borrowed directly from classic nuclear deterrence theory, this framework states that while the dangerous transition phase of acquiring a strategic capability is highly volatile and war-prone, the fully finalized realization of that capability acts as a robust mechanism for system-wide stabilization [00:24:12]. Applied to current geopolitics, the strategic irony is that Washington's moralistic refusal to officially recognize an opponent's security zones actually prevents the emergence of an established sphere equilibrium. By keeping borders conceptually fluid and refusing to codify hard red lines, the international system remains locked in the highly volatile creation phase, directly increasing the probability of miscalculations and kinetic proxy collisions.
The Disruptive Capacity vs. Strategic Interest Typology
This matrix predicts whether an external rival will actively challenge a dominant power's sphere based on two key structural dimensions: material capacity (relative balance of power and regional internal cohesion) and strategic interest (trajectory shifts and geopolitical value of the contested ground) [00:28:26]. This framework uncovers the strategic rationale behind past British concessions to the rising United States during the 19th century; despite possessing the raw capacity to push back, Britain calculated that its core strategic interests were pinned to European security threats, leading them to tolerate an American sphere in the West. It highlights the modern dilemma where over-extending interests into low-value, high-risk buffer states like Georgia or Ukraine can trigger severe systemic blowback from a localized rival.
Regional Stabilizer (The Imperial Pacifier)
This concept states that a highly dominant, unchecked great power can enforce internal stability over a cluster of weaker client nations by systematically freezing localized rivalries and preventing border conflicts [00:18:00]. Historically applied as the "American Pacifier," this architecture explains the complete absence of militarized conflict between historical European rivals within NATO or across the Western Hemisphere. The essayistic irony, however, is that this internal freezing requires massive material carrot investments; when a global patron switches its strategy to heavy-handed, unilateral coercion, the underlying bargain erodes, transforming a cooperative alliance order into a brittle system vulnerable to domestic nationalist resistance and foreign exploitation.
6. Anecdotes
The Consolidated US Consolidation of the Western Hemisphere (1900-1930)
Dr. O'Rourke recounts that during the intense regional expansion phase of the American sphere, the United States aggressively overthrew 15 independent governments in Latin America and executed over 6,000 distinct gunboat deployments to forcibly stamp out European economic presence and mandate regional security compliance [00:26:33]. The speaker introduces this stark historical data point to directly dismantle the benign, non-coercive myth of the rules-based order propagated within Washington. It demonstrates that the initial construction of any highly successful sphere—including America's own baseline regional footprint—historically demands a brutal, sustained deployment of raw kinetic force to successfully secure boundaries.
The Poisoning of Viktor Yushchenko (2004)
During the structural buildup to the 2004 Ukrainian presidential election, the pro-Western candidate Viktor Yushchenko was mysteriously poisoned with near-fatal doses of TCDD dioxin, leaving him permanently disfigured amid a highly corrupt voting process that initially favored pro-Russian candidate Viktor Yanukovych [00:42:35]. The speaker highlights this dramatic historical event to ground the abstract concept of regional contestation into concrete terms. It showcases how a domestic election within a neutral buffer state quickly mutates into an arena for proxy conflict, where competing foreign powers deploy severe intelligence operations to tilt the balance of the target state's foreign policy alignment.
The Post-Crimea Electoral Math Paradox (2014)
Following the mass Euromaidan protests and the ouster of Yanukovych in 2014, Russia reacted by deploying military force to annex the strategic Crimean peninsula and backing armed separatists in the eastern Donbas region [00:45:02]. Dr. O'Rourke details the unintended structural consequence of this move: by physically separating Crimea from the state, Russia inadvertently cut out approximately 12% of the most reliably pro-Russian voting demographic from the Ukrainian national electorate [00:45:23]. The speaker uses this example to illustrate the tactical ironies embedded in sphere management; a short-term territorial grab aimed at securing a local naval base can fundamentally ruin a power's long-term political capability to influence the broader client state's governance.
The Nixon-Kissinger Detente and the Thawing of the Cold War
In the early 1970s, President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger pivoted US grand strategy toward an explicit, pragmatic recognition of the Soviet Union's sphere of influence across Eastern Europe, initiating the era known as Detente [00:34:08]. The speaker details how this diplomatic accommodation led directly to a historic reduction in flashpoint global crises—such as the high-stakes nuclear standoffs seen over Berlin and Cuba in the decades prior—while opening the structural pathway for sweeping arms control treaties [00:34:37]. This example serves as a primary pillar for the central argument that recognizing a rival's strategic depth is not an act of moral cowardice, but an effective realist tool to secure great power stability.
7. References & Recommendations
Books
Spheres of Influence: The Architecture of Power in World Politics by Dr. Lindsey O'Rourke – The primary book manuscript under discussion, detailing the multi-year project tracking historical data, typologies, and the life cycle of great power regional strategies [00:00:35].
Covert Regime Change: America's Secret Cold War by Dr. Lindsey O'Rourke – Referenced during the audience Q&A session to analyze the historical success and failure metrics of US intelligence operations [00:54:24].
Theories & Academic Frameworks
David Lake's Hierarchy Theories – Brought up by the speaker to conceptualize how great power spheres function as force multipliers through integrated security and authority systems [00:17:07].
Michael Mastanduno's Hegemonic Rules – Referenced inline to contextualize the economic privileges of sphere building, where the core hegemon acts as a system maker and privilege taker [00:19:07].
Joseph Joffe's American Pacifier Concept – Highlighted to explain how a stabilizing central authority systematically dampens security dilemmas between lesser client states within its geographical cluster [00:18:05].
Albert Hirschman's Economic Influence Frameworks – Referenced during the professor's responses to audience queries regarding the raw costs, money-losing aspects, and supply chain dependencies of economic co-optation models [01:21:47].
Paul Schroeder's Concert Analysis – Cited as expert backing to demonstrate the unique stability and safety of smaller states under the multi-polar sphere allocations of the Concert of Europe [00:35:55].
People
Antony Blinken – Former US Secretary of State, quoted to define the prevailing Washington consensus that explicitly rejects the historical validity of spheres of influence [00:06:51].
Donald Trump – 45th and 47th US President, referenced regarding his administration's overt revival of the Monroe Doctrine and the deployment of unilateral coercive sticks against both adversaries and allies [00:07:32].
Robert Kagan – Neoconservative foreign policy scholar, cited to illustrate the ideological position that views foreign spheres of influence as an absolute recipe for systemic disaster [00:05:52].
Woodrow Wilson – 28th US President, cited historically for using the explicit moral rejection of European spheres of influence as a strategic rationale to enter World War I [00:07:48].
Franklin D. Roosevelt – 32nd US President, cited for public rhetoric condemning spheres while covertly engineering a post-war order carved up by major regional powers [00:07:48, 01:10:52].
George H.W. Bush – 41st US President, referenced for his explicit post-Cold War declarations rejecting the division of Europe into exclusive geopolitical zones [00:07:58].
Marco Rubio – US Politician, quoted during congressional hearings to underscore the bipartisan refusal in Washington to openly negotiate sphere boundaries with China or Russia [00:09:06].
Victoria Nuland – Former US diplomat, quoted regarding the specific capital outlays committed to stabilizing Ukrainian governance networks [00:43:14].
Geir Lundestad – Historian, referenced regarding his "Empire by Invitation" framework used to illustrate post-war Western European alignment with the United States [00:28:50].
Vladimir Putin – President of the Russian Federation, quoted regarding his explicit warnings condemning Western color revolutions as unilateral tools used to expand the American sphere [00:43:34].
George W. Bush – 43rd US President, cited for pushing the controversial 2008 Bucharest Declaration that formally set Ukraine and Georgia on a path toward NATO integration [00:43:57].
Dmitry Medvedev – Former President of Russia, cited for his explicit 2008 post-Georgia invasion declaration asserting Russia's historical regions of privileged interest [00:44:39].
Barack Obama – 44th US President, quoted from his realist assessments acknowledging that Ukraine is inherently vulnerable to Russian military domination due to its geographic position [00:47:02].
Volodymyr Zelenskyy – President of Ukraine, referenced regarding high-level strategic partnerships and security declarations signed with the Biden administration in 2021 [00:47:55].
Sergey Lavrov – Foreign Minister of the Russian Federation, quoted from critical pre-war diplomatic meetings directly confronting Western counterparts over the expansion of NATO boundaries [00:49:36].
Mark Carney – Former Governor of the Bank of England and Bank of Canada, quoted criticizing the breakdown of the basic structural bargain backing American hegemony [00:52:59].
Alexander De Croo – Prime Minister of Belgium, quoted to show growing European resentment against coercive, asymmetric US economic policies [00:53:30].
John Mearsheimer – Leading offensive realist scholar, referenced by an audience member as the previous week's speaker to contrast theories on hegemony and regional survival [01:02:36].
Geopolitical Institutions & Treaties
North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) – The central security architecture analyzed both as an instrument of the American global sphere and as the primary structural trigger for conflict with the Russian Federation [00:10:42].
Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO) – Russia’s parallel mutual defense framework, cited as a direct architectural counterweight to NATO expansion [00:40:50].
Eurasian Customs Union / Eurasian Economic Union – Russia's regional economic integration frameworks, analyzed as architectural counterweights to the European Union's Eastern Partnership initiatives [00:40:36].
Austrian State Treaty (1955) – Recommended by Dr. O'Rourke as the optimal historical template to resolve the current war via mandated military neutrality for Ukraine [00:51:36].
Monroe Doctrine (1823) – The foundational 19th-century US policy declaration establishing an exclusive American sphere of influence across the Western Hemisphere [00:10:18].
Historical Events
Congress of Vienna (1815) – The foundational historical event where European empires partitioned the continent into balanced spheres of influence, securing decades of great power peace [00:13:55].
The Orange Revolution (2004) – The domestic Ukrainian political crisis that marked a critical transition from a neutral state into an intensely contested proxy region [00:42:35].
The Bucharest Declaration (2008) – The historic NATO summit declaration asserting that Ukraine and Georgia would eventually become members, crossing an explicit Russian red line [00:43:57].
The Euromaidan Crisis (2014) – The popular revolution that unseated pro-Russian President Yanukovych, triggering immediate Russian kinetic intervention in Crimea and the Donbas region [00:45:02].
8. The Bottomline (by AI)
The structural lesson of this analysis is that spheres of influence cannot be eliminated from world politics because they are the natural product of great power survival within an anarchic international system. Moving forward, the United States must transcend its moralistic, anti-sphere rhetoric and actively negotiate clear territorial red lines with contemporary rivals if it wishes to avert catastrophic kinetic collisions in contested zones like Taiwan. To maintain its long-term architecture, Washington must urgently rebalance its grand strategy away from unilateral coercive sticks and reinvest heavily in cooperative, material carrots that incentivize voluntary alignment from core global allies. Watch for whether upcoming US administrations embrace a realistic framework of regional neutrality for border states or continue an over-extended policy of containment that drives global favorability further toward China's alternative architectural offerings.
Jul 13, 2026
Yanis Varoufakis | Closing Keynote | Thursday 18th June 2026 | Web3 Foundation
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Mutual Defense Treaties (OAS)
17 Members
Current quantity of operational mutual defense commitments anchored by the United States within the Organization of American States framework.
Total institutional capital funneled by the United States through groups like the National Endowment for Democracy to support pro-Western democratic movements.