Throughout the summer, we’re sharing essays from the Foreign Affairs archives that explore what history can—and cannot—tell us about today’s pressing global issues. Next up is “The Return of Spheres of Influence,” a recent essay by the scholar Monica Duffy Toft that examined the parallels between the Yalta conference in the final months of World War II and present-day attempts to negotiate an end to the war in Ukraine.
Eighty years ago, the leaders of the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States met in Yalta to “divide Europe into spheres of influence” so that they could determine “the sovereignty and future of nearby neighbors,” wrote Toft. Today, the heads of China, Russia, and the United States are again “seeking to negotiate a new global order primarily with each other,” one in which multilateral institutions are cast aside and “great powers dictate terms to weaker states.” Moscow, for example, is demanding that “Ukraine accept territorial losses and remain outside Western military alliances, an outcome that would render the country a satellite of Russia” and reward the use of military force.
Yet neatly cutting up spheres of influence “has become a much trickier project” than it was in 1945, Toft noted. The world today is more interdependent than it was then, and established multilateral institutions may reassert themselves. If organizations such as the European Union and NATO fight for the rules-based order, Toft wrote, they might protect the world from the great powers that “wish to carve it into pieces.”
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