THE LONG VIEW

It happened before—not in Beijing, not in Washington, but in Vienna, 1815. After the fall of Napoleon, the great powers of Europe gathered to redraw the map, not through law, but through balance. The Concert of Europe was born—a system where order rested on mutual recognition of spheres, not rights of nations. For a time, it brought peace. But it was a peace built on exclusion, on the silent consent of the powerful to divide the world among themselves. And every time a small nation rose—Poland, Hungary, Greece—the system cracked. The lesson was clear: when great powers bargain over territory and influence in secret, sovereignty becomes a fiction. Fast forward to 1945: the United States, fresh from defeating empire, rejected that old order. It built a new one—flawed, yes, but open. The Marshall Plan, the UN, NATO, the Bretton Woods system—all were designed to prevent the return of spheres. And yet, here we are, in 2026, watching the United States propose not a renewal of that order, but its surrender. The 'Donroe Doctrine' is not a revival of the Monroe Doctrine—it is its betrayal. Monroe warned Europe to stay out of the Americas; he did not say the U.S. could do as it pleased. Roosevelt added gunboats. Trump adds tariffs, coups, and land grabs. But the deeper betrayal is ideological: by embracing spheres, the U.S. legitimizes the very logic it once opposed. And in doing so, it hands China the ultimate weapon—not a port in Peru, not a mine in Bolivia, but the moral high ground. For if the United States now claims the right to dominate its hemisphere, who can deny China the same in the South China Sea? Who can blame Russia for claiming Ukraine? The precedent is set. The irony is brutal: in trying to stop empire, America becomes the model for the next one. —Marcus Ashworth