[CoCグローバルメモ] 衝突する秩序の新たな権域：合意不在による混乱と競争
| シンクタンク世界評議会（CoC: Council of Councils）は、米国外交協会（CFR: Council on Foreign Relations）がグローバルな懸案事項の解決策を見出すために2011年に設立し、着実に運営している国際協議体です。世界27の有数のシンクタンクが参加する中で、東アジア研究所（EAI）は創立当初からのメンバーであり、韓国を代表する唯一の会員機関として継続的な貢献をしています。 本メモは、2025年末に公開されたトランプ第2期政権の国家安全保障戦略（NSS: National Security Strategy）文書に対するCoCの論評であり、米国外交協会（CFR）のホームページに掲載された分析です。著者らは、国家安全保障戦略文書において衝突する秩序を指摘し、韓国のような中堅国が共に開放的で包容的な秩序を再創造し、戦略的自律性を確保すべきだと提言しています。 |
The international order is often described today as returning to a world of spheres of influence. Yet that formulation is misleading. The current change is not a simple reversion to nineteenth-century geopolitics or great power concert, but rather the emergence of a far more unstable hybrid order, in which different organizing principles coexist and collide. Nowhere is that more evident than in the recent recalibration of U.S. grand strategy outlined by the Trump administration.
The 2025 National Security Strategy treats the Western Hemisphere as a sphere of influence, where the United States asserts its right to shape political and security outcomes. In contrast, the strategy defines the Indo-Pacific not as a U.S. sphere but a zone requiring strategic adjustment. In that zone, the United States seeks to deter China from becoming the dominant regional hegemon rather than to exercise direct regional primacy. This conflicting logic—recognizing a U.S. sphere in the Americas while not recognizing China’s potential sphere in the Indo-Pacific—already reveals a fundamental tension in U.S. grand strategy.
In classical international politics, stable spheres of influence could only exist when the strongest powers reached a form of great power concert—an implicit or explicit consensus among major states pertaining to the limits of their authority and restraint. A concert made spheres predictable and, in a limited sense, manageable. Today, however, such an understanding existing among the United States, China, and Russia is unlikely. Strategic distrust runs deep, ideological differences are vast, and technological rivalry has turned even economic interdependence into a security liability. Under those conditions, spheres of influence and their irrelevant applications are more likely to generate friction, miscalculation, and regional coercion.
The U.S. intervention in Venezuela highlights that dilemma. By asserting its hemispheric prerogatives through force, Washington undermines the principles it uses to oppose similar claims by powers elsewhere. In Asia, the danger is not simply China seeking a sphere of influence but also competing great powers normalizing incompatible regional orders with different rules, expectations, and hierarchies.
For South Korea and other Asian middle powers, that fragmentation of the global order poses a greater threat than any single sphere. Rather than adapting to rival zones of dominance, Korea’s long-term interest lies in reshaping the liberal, rules-based, and inclusive order that allows smaller states to have strategic autonomy, economic openness, and political choices. In a world drifting into regionalized power systems, South Korea should work with like-minded partners to prevent the Indo-Pacific from becoming a closed arena of great power entitlement—and to maintain an open space for cooperation, law, inclusiveness, and sovereign equality.
■ チョン・ジェソン_EAI理事長、ソウル大学政治外交学部教授。
■ オ・インファン_EAI主任研究員、ソウル大学政治外交学部講師。
■ 担当および編集： イ・サンジュン_EAI研究員
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*この本文は韓国語で書かれた原文を AI で翻訳したものです。一部の翻訳やニュアンスに誤りがある場合があります。