The World Splits in Three

 

Monica Duffy Toft

The World Splits in Three

Dr. Duffy Toft is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2026/01/11/opinion/trump-new-world-order.html

 

The post-World War II rules-based order is collapsing, and the world’s most powerful states are reaching for a dated playbook: spheres of influence. Russia has invaded Ukraine twice. China has militarized the South China Sea. The United States has seized Venezuela’s sitting president and publicly threatened to acquire Greenland from a NATO ally by force. What unites these actions is a shared premise: Great powers must expand or die.

 

During World War II, the leaders of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union met at Yalta and effectively divided Europe into rival blocs — one managing an open system that gradually delegitimized colonialism, the other a closed system sustained through repression. The participants knew that allowing the Soviet Union to trample the sovereign aspirations of Eastern Europe was savagely unfair, but the alternative was more war. The arrangement worked because it was negotiated, bounded and served the mutual interests of leaders entering an age when worldwide conflict could mean extinction.

 

What’s taking shape today has no guarantee of similar success. Instead we are entering a world where great powers seek domination without rules, limits or agreed boundaries. It is sphere logic without sphere discipline.

 

Three key features of today’s spheres undermine their ability to create a stable world order. The first is that the current power consolidation is not a response to the imminent threat of another world war. The Yalta Agreement of 1945 was forged among exhausted states to prevent a return to global conflict. The spheres now taking shape offer no comparable stabilizing benefit. If anything, they may lead the world down the opposite path.

 

Second is the nature of America’s current leadership. The world’s most powerful democracy is now led by a president who has inverted a century of U.S. foreign policy, which sought to make the world safe from war in support of free trade. PresidentTrump has made clear his admiration for President Xi Jinping of China and President Vladimir Putin of Russia — not so much as individuals, but as autocrats capable of using state power to advance and maintain their own power. All three men have revised history in ways that support a demand for muscular, militarily coercive foreign policy.

 

The third is that today, geography alone can no longer sustain spheres of power as it once did. Even as the Trump administration seeks to dominate the Western Hemisphere, American influence still relies on alliances, overseas bases and centrality in global finance and trade. China, too, has constructed extensive global networks through trade, infrastructure finance and technology. Even Russia remains dependent on global markets through energy, food and arms exports. None of these states can retreat into self-contained bubbles without undermining the overlapping networks needed to maintain their power.

 

The retreat that is already well underway is self-defeating. Some of the most existential threats that will confront great powers this century — future pandemics, climate change, weaponized artificial intelligence, cyberattacks and transnational terrorism — simply cannot be managed alone. As the world fractures once more into rival spheres, the cooperation needed to address those threats is withering.

 

The emerging landscape promises stability but delivers only uncertainty and accumulating dangers: more flashpoints among nuclear-armed powers, more nuclear proliferation, less cooperation on global threats and a system structurally incapable of mitigating the risks it creates.