Great Powers?
By 
As we’re kicking off the second quarter of the 21st century (and I remember 1/1/2000 like it was yesterday), 1945 asked me to rank the Eight Greats, with some thoughts about spheres of influence thrown in…
The honest truth about “spheres of influence” is that they represent an observation about the current state of the world, not a normative judgment or a source of policy guidance. The most brutal conflicts in world history (between Russia and Germany and between China and Japan) have involved contests for supremacy within a regional order, not unwanted interference from external powers. Large countries are necessarily influential in their neighborhoods because they occupy positions at the top of vast social, financial, and economic networks.
This does not mean that they enjoy special rights in those neighborhoods or that they can simply do as they wish; as Russia has discovered and the United States may find out, it is far more advantageous to have Canada as a neighbor than Ukraine. Still, as generations of international relations theorists have argued, it is better to wield power than to be the subject of power.
Photo Credit: By 防衛省統合幕僚監部 – https://www.mod.go.jp/js/pdf/2023/p20230406_01.pdf, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=130432562