Trump’s ‘American Dominance’ May Leave Us With Nothing
The president’s moves in Venezuela foretell a new global system.
By Anne Applebaum, The Atlantic
In George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984, the world is divided into three spheres of influence: Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia, all perpetually at war. Sometimes two of the states form an alliance against the third. Sometimes they abruptly switch sides. No reasons are given. Instead, the Party tells the proles, “We have always been at war with Eastasia.” Newspapers and history books are quickly rewritten to make that seem true.
Orwell’s world is fiction, but some want it to become reality. Since well before President Donald Trump’s second term, the idea that the world should have three spheres of influence—an Asia dominated by China, a Europe dominated by Russia, and a Western Hemisphere dominated by the United States—has been kicking around the internet in a desultory way, mostly promoted by Russians who want to control what they call their “near abroad,” or perhaps just want their country, with its weak economy and faltering army, to be mentioned in the same breath as the United States and China.
