The collapse of Pax Americana may not produce a clean bipolar standoff between democracies and autocracies. A more chaotic outcome looms: a world fractured into competing regional empires, where the United States retreats to the Western Hemisphere, China dominates East Asia, Russia consolidates the former Soviet space, and a half-dozen other powers scramble for their own spheres of influence.
That scenario is laid out by Hal Brands, a Johns Hopkins professor and American Enterprise Institute fellow, in a major essay for Foreign Policy's Spring 2026 issue, "Hvylya" reports.
In Brands's mapping, a retreating America triggers a cascade. India grabs for primacy in South Asia and the Indian Ocean. Turkey stakes out a post-Ottoman domain at the intersection of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Israel, Saudi Arabia, and other contenders jostle for hegemony in the Red Sea complex. International law disintegrates as regional masters set their own norms, rewire trade and investment flows, and enforce strict limits on their neighbors' ties to other powers. The result is what Brands calls a set of "Monroe Doctrines for various parts of the world."
The spheres-of-influence model promises stability through great-power accommodation - strong states divide the globe and keep order within their zones. But Brands argues this promise is hollow. Complex economic interdependence makes any shift to sealed spheres deeply acrimonious. And the achievement of a regional sphere may be the beginning of ambitions rather than the end: for the United States itself, hemispheric primacy was historically a launching pad for global intervention, not a substitute for it.
The economic costs for America would be severe. There would be no more favorable trade deals with Eurasian allies desperate for U.S. protection, no reason for Japan or Germany to prop up dollar dominance. If Washington loses access to East Asia's dynamic economies and supply chains, competing with China becomes vastly harder. Brands sums up the math bluntly: "Taiwan for Honduras isn't a good trade."
Most critically, spheres of influence are not simply negotiated - their creation is often violent. Ambitious autocracies have a historical record of brutality and even genocide within their zones of control. And smaller states rarely accept domination passively: Ukraine's war against Russia and Japan's potential nuclear response to Chinese pressure both demonstrate that a spheres-based order could prove far bloodier than its proponents imagine.
Previously: Friedman explained who will replace the Americans as Europe's shield.