The Crisis of the Nation-State and the Politics of “Zones of Influence”

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Greater Space, living space, and zones of influence 

The Trump administration’s theory of zones of influence draws on Carl Schmitt’s notion of Großraum[1], or “greater space.” Schmitt was himself an admirer of the Monroe Doctrine (1823). Often pithily formulated as “America for Americans,” this doctrine served as a warning to Europeans that any intervention in American affairs was forbidden. By “American,” President Monroe meant the entire American land mass from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, thus including South America, which was only partially decolonized at the time. It served to accentuate America’s rupture with the conception of state power developed by its former colonizer, England. In return, the United States pledged not to intervene in the affairs of the European countries.²

One of Adolf Hitler’s objectives, already mentioned in Mein Kampf, was to give the Reich a “living space,” a Lebensraum. Unlike the ancient Germanic peoples, who in the 4th and 5th centuries had sought to extend their living space toward southern and western Europe, Hitler turned towards the East in order to secure new territories, for it was there that the German people would find the lands and resources necessary to its full development. The text cited above, written between 1939-41, furnishes Schmitt’s theoretical and political justification. Concerning Monroe, Schmitt declares that, “The American Monroe Doctrine proclaimed in 1823 is the first and, until now, most successful example of a Großraum principle in the modern history of international law.”³ Its application to the German Reich is based on a national destiny: “It is an expression of genuine political power when a great nation determines the ways of speaking and even the ways of thinking, the vocabulary, the terminology, and the concepts of other nations on its own terms.”⁴ 

The political equivalence often made between Schmitt’s Großraum and Hitler’s Lebensraum is neither conceptually nor factually accurate. It’s a political extrapolation, a retroactive assimilation made in the aftermath of history. Still, there is a chronological proximity that can lead to political usages and reinterpretations, tending toward an assimilation of the two concepts (expansionism, interventionism, appropriationism, hegemony, etc.).

Schmitt’s concept of Großraum is of a juridical and geopolitical nature. It refers to regional or continental (or maritime) “greater spaces” organized by a dominant power, a sovereign state (with or without a system of exception) or an empire that institutes its own legal order according to its “sphere of influence” and its “land seizures” (Landnahme); these policies are implemented according to the the model of European international law, and derive their legitimacy from a spatialized sovereignty.

The Nazi notion of Lebensraum is both ideological and biological. It designates a “living space” necessary to a people for living and reproducing. It draws its legitimacy from demographic, racial, and imperial arguments. It aims to justify territorial expansion and annexations that may lead to the exclusion or elimination of populations judged to be inferior or degenerate.

In contrast to the anti-imperialist position, often of Latin-American origin, which views the Monroe Doctrine as the exercise of American imperialism, Schmitt interprets it as the end of the colonial order that European powers had imposed on the American continent. The “greater space” presents itself as the instrument for overcoming a frozen situation, inherited from the international law of the 19th century, according to which the equilibrium between states or nation-states constitutes the basis of all international order and the primary guarantee of the efficacy of the law of nations. The introduction of the concept of “greater space” into the framework of international law is will, Schmitt says, allow us to account for the dynamics actually at work in the present, particularly that in which we see “a great people” (the German people) affirming its superiority over other peoples, manifesting its powers and asserting its right to establish itself in a “great concrete space.”⁵

However, in the American policies of the ensuing decades, Schmitt observes a deviation from the original inspiration for the Monroe Doctrine, first with the “Roosevelt corollary” of 1903 — which justified the defense of the U.S. interests in South America and the Caribbean — and then with an imperial policy in the 20th century. In fact, Schmitt argues, the U.S. has gradually dissolved a concrete, spatially determined organizing principle into universalist, global ideas. As a result, U.S. power allows itself to interfere in all matters under humanitarian pretexts, indissolubly joining “ideals,” “values,” and pan-interventionism. “Universalistic general concepts that encompass the world are the typical weapons of interventionism in international law.”⁶ 

What makes Schmitt particularly relevant today is the fact that his theory rests on a concept of empire [Reich], which he regards as the necessary framework to allow the notion of “greater space” to fully come into its own:

Empires [Reichs] are the leading and bearing powers whose political ideas radiate into a certain Großraum and which fundamentally exclude the interventions of spatially alien powers into this Großraum. The Großraum is, of course, not identical with the Reich in the sense that the Reich is not the same as the Großraum protected from interventions by that Reich. Not every state or every people within the Großraum is in itself a piece of the Reich, just as little as one thinks of declaring Brazil or Argentina a part of the United States with the recognition of the Monroe Doctrine…Every Reich has a Großraum into which its political idea radiates and which is not to be confronted with foreign interventions.⁷ 

At the time Schmitt articulated this theory (1939) it appeared to stand in contradiction with the dominant figure of the nation state, even in the ambiguous form of the Monroe Doctrine. If the present situation affords it a newly favorable terrain, this is because it is a time of crisis for nation-states.

This critique of universalism has been taken up, in part, by Alexander Dugin, a behind-the-scenes adviser to Putin, with the idea of stabilizing the world outside of universalist discourse. What may seem surprising is that Trump’s U.S. is rallying to this cause, whereas until then — and even during its more or less isolationist phases — it had tended to embrace the universalist dimension, either through a more or less self-serving and therefore selective defense of human rights, or through the promotion of an “American way of life,” with all the “soft power” this implies. This aspect — at once political, ideological, and cultural — aligned with the economic movement of capital expansion and its globalization on a worldwide scale. In fact, this soft power never disappeared; it has been shifted to initiatives such as “OpenAI for countries,” which aims to promote democratic AI in the Gulf and elsewhere as a means to counter the model of Chinese AI. Moreover, AI is presented as being productive rather than extractive, with significant local benefits where it is developed.          

This reversal, initiated by Obama and Biden but radicalized by Trump, is not primarily the expression of an all-powerful imperialism that dictates its will to the world. In fact, the new global power structure rather reflects the effective loss of the hegemonic character of American dominance and the reality of a diminished power, now forced to refocus primarily on its own backyard (the American continents) while pressuring its former European allies to pay for the services rendered to them since 1945 (what Trump calls “breaking the asymmetry”). 

To sum up, we are still quite far from what might constitute an Empire extending its domination in step with the expansion of capital produced by globalization. As Trump keeps hammering home: “The American dream is more and more out of reach.” And that goes for Americans at home as well as, a fortiori, for those who might hope to become that.

Among the many examples that can be given of the dulling of the American blade, consider these two: first, the U.S.’s inability to get South Korea and Japan to respect commercial agreements whereby, in exchange for a lowering of tariffs (from 25 to 15%) originally set by Trump, those two countries would invest massively in the United States. Apart from the fact that it wasn’t a matter of direct investments but rather loans and guarantees to corporations in order to restructure and galvanize sectors like the shipyards, nothing has yet been disbursed by the two Asian countries, which are visibly dragging their feet in view of an electoral term that will end in three years; next, its inability to act on the under-valuated exchange rate of Chinese currency — a much more critical issue than the question of tariffs for reducing dependence on imports — even though Nixon had succeeded in 1971 in exerting pressure on the Japanese and German currencies.

Mercantilism and physiocracy: Trump’s “primitive” side

The preceding theoretical — rather than geopolitical — considerations should not obscure the fact that the economic tropism of Trump is reactionary in the strictest sense of the term, since his relationship with energy is rooted in the need for its physical possession in an era of capital’s  fictivization/virtualization. For him, oil (and shale gas) function as a magical source of power. He is often accused of pursuing a mercantilist politics, since it is based on the belief in a zero-sum game; yet this is not incompatible with his quasi-physiocratic conception of wealth. Indeed, despite their differences, these two preclassical theories share a common point, which is to see the source of wealth only in the raw products of nature (agriculture and livestock among the physiocrats; mining of precious metals among the mercantilists). In a way, this amounts to thinking that the economy is reduced to the primary sector. These two conceptions are reflective of the agrarian and artisanal societies of a preindustrial era, something that we underscore and critique moreover in our text on extractivism. They are ineffective in the current phase of capital’s totalization, determined by its ability to integrate AI and technoscience in general, and in which the new extractive activity is just one element (of production, certainly, but tied to circulation) among others of the process as a whole.

In any case, this Trumpian politics appears anachronistic compared with the one pursued at the end of the Iraq war, a period during which the United States did not, by any means, flood Iraq and Kuwait with investments (a thesis nevertheless put forward by anti-imperialists of every stripe). On the contrary, it allowed the dominant global commercial logic of the time to play out — that of fully opening the floodgates and the monitoring the flow⁸ — including allowing countries like China to profit from the situation, because they still pursued a vision of growth that was differential, to be sure, but a growth for everyone, that of a “happy globalization,” as the essayists say retrospectively.

Breaking with this policy of openness in favor of a controlled world order capable of reconciling free exchange, deregulation, and re-regularization at the highest level — that is, the level of hypercapitalism at the top (for example, regarding environmental and climate issues) — Trump remains mired in his own mercantilist treasure hunt, fixated on Venezuelan oil, about which he really should ask himself why almost no one wants it, not the major American oil companies in any case. Yet, for a great power or for capital in general, raw materials are not “to be taken” but “to be exploited,” an object of investment, an exercise of expertise, of the capital/labor coupling, of integration into global markets — a quite different situation from that of preindustrial societies or even of the first industrial revolution.

Consequently, the triumph of this “model” wouldn’t leave any place for Africa outside the Maghreb, with an exception like Rwanda, where you have the melee between China, Russia via Wagner, jihadists, and France, with for the first two pursuing a more predatory strategy, the latter two a more political and strategic vision. Nevertheless, Africa’s relative spatial distance from the great powers means it is less subject to the trade tensions and still benefits from the preferential treatment granted to the Sub-Saharan countries by the US to prevent the Chinese from gaining a foothold. 

Questions raised by the current configuration 

1) Isn’t this American recentering artificial, given how far interdependence has already progressed and how small the world has become — on the one hand, thanks to digital technologies, the power of the informational and virtual mega-systems, and AI; and on the other, owing to the fact of the globalization process?

2) Is the notion of the “regional” still relevant in the face of a globalization that, for its part, makes the world larger because the Earth is round? Thus, China has become South America’s leading economic partner, and the Peruvian port of Chancey (November 2024), one of the largest in the world, is part of the “Belt and Road” Initiative, a Chinese project that aims to revive the ancient Silk Roads. The fact is that, beyond the constraints occasioned by the mutual dependence produced by the international division of labor, globalization continues…without the United States (see the future E.U.-Mercosur trade agreement and the India-E.U. agreement of late January 2026, as well as the establishment of the African Continental Free Trade Area). This is a new development.

3) Is this theory of greater spaces compatible with the concept of “global governance” as it emerged in the 1990s? This notion presupposes that nation-states — or some of them, anyway — are no longer capable of effectively carrying out their regulatory duties in economic and social spheres, of addressing the new realities of globalization, or of managing their flows, and that other actors (such as the IMF, the WTO, or the multinational firms) should dictate these tasks to them.

To this question on could answer yes insofar as the regionalization of globalization doesn’t mean its breakdown, but rather its reorganization on the basis of the new situation of global capital, which no longer produces, for the moment anyway, a single hegemonic pole and where certain characteristics of the former great empires are reemerging, along with their ability to delegate forms of power to the most distant or problematic regions of their central sovereignty. To this extent, regional spaces are themselves managed in part by intermediary powers, such as Turkey, to cite only one example.

Yes, indeed, if we look at what recently occurred at Davos, where Trump found himself isolated. What is happening in Iran must be closely examined from this perspective, since that country is supposed to be a regional power, which explains both the U.S.’s ambiguous support for the revolt underway since winter 2025, and the silence of the left and the extreme left (it prefers the “anti-imperialist” ayatollahs to the shahs in the pay of imperialism!); a silence already troubling at the time of the “Woman, Life, Liberty” movement (September 2022).

No, if one considers that the very structure of this “domination without hegemony”⁹, to borrow Giovanni Arighi’s term, makes it dependent on political powers that necessarily embody a latent or overt imperium (cf. Trump and the excessive personification of the executive and the “real country”), bringer of war against the external enemy (terrorism yesterday, China tomorrow) or civil enemy (the brutal repression of migrants, the securitarian measures leveled against protest movements like those in Minneapolis).

This notion of non-hegemonic domination does not seem to us to be incompatible with that of “non-systemic domination” put forward by Jacques Guigou in issue 14 of Temps critiques (2003), according to which capital is indeed still a social relation of domination rather than an “automatic subject” responding to the plane of capital. 

Xi, Putin, and Trump are personifications of power more than profit, and they give the impression of dominating the economic world either directly, as the first two do, or indirectly as the third does. But while this is partly true for Xi and Putin — given the fate reserved for the “oligarchs” who have fallen from grace — it’s less so for Trump. In fact, he lacks this power over major corporations and their executives, and he knows it, so he primarily targets administration, the symbol of the “deep state” according to MAGA terminology and values. It’s more at this level that he can exert effective pressure than on multinational firms and platforms (see his hesitations regarding the potential enforcement of antitrust laws).

The vision of a return to politics and “values” that would be disconnected from everything else — such as the economy — and exist in a vacuum, makes little sense for the American case. Wall Street and the Fed are not under the thumb of the illuminati of the “Dark Enlightenment,” and their role, like that of the dollar, is both national and international, just as is the case with Big Tech.

Moreover, the politics of Trump and his advisers are not unequivocal; if on the one hand, there is a desire on their part to re-Americanize Big Tech companies that wished, however, to be global actors, on the other hand, they are constrained to form an international union around AI. The Pax Silica signed December 12, 2025 is an international alliance for securing the whole value chain of the AI economy, an industrial architecture capable of withstanding future shocks. Energy dominance is no longer limited to the extraction of hydrocarbons but also consists in converting energy and raw materials into computing power. Initially, the agreement included the United States, Japan, South Korea, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Australia, Israel, and Singapore, and aims to secure all the links in the chain, from the upstream mining sector to cutting-edge manufacturing and downstream data center logistics. (In other words, what in industrial terms used to be referred to as a process of “vertical concentration.”) The recent addition of the United Arab Emirates and Qatar reinforces the dynamic of this partnership. Pax Silica spreads risk, strengthens capacities, and allocates roles among countries according to their comparative advantages as defined by classic liberal policy. It constitutes a tentative response to the integrated industrial strategies that have enabled China to become the power that it is today.

Arnaud Orain, in his Capitalism of Finitude, is also aware of the need to reintroduce the importance of the corporation in his overall analysis — which is, overall, a geostrategic analysis — due to the importance he attaches to control of the seas, ports, maritime transport, and the navy. But he does so somewhat as a concession, seeing their importance only in the form of “Corporate States” [Compagnies-États], which appears to be his conception of capitalist totalization. Perhaps he means by this the increased importance of hybrid, partly-public, partly-private entities? But then why not approach the current reorganization of capital in terms of networks? This doesn’t seem to be what he has in mind, since his argument cites the former East India Company, its power and its longevity at a time when, to say the least, acceleration was not the defining characteristic of capital, as the period required for accumulation was still lengthy, as it was for the rate of circulation, which one didn’t yet speak of in terms of “flows.”

Things are different today. The “democratization of capital”— driven first by its financialization, then by its technologization and virtualization — is leading to accelerated creative destruction and the rapid depletion of economic rents. The failure of Apple’s latest strategy provides us with a recent example. Let us not forget, either, that the oldest of the “magnificent 7,” Microsoft, is 50 years old, while Meta is only 20; that Google appears to be leading the AI race, but OpenAI and Anthropic are already gaining ground. At the microeconomic level, things are less visible but just as evident and active, with, for example, American project management engineers fully embracing the automation of the most tedious or difficult tasks¹⁰, which is proving to be a partial remedy against Chinese competition and offshoring without needing to threaten the “enemy,” while retaining the loyalty of the remaining workforce.

No, again, if the previous complementarity of globalization in its first version becomes a distortion of trade, now that various powers no longer want to play the game (“zero sum,” say Trump and the neo-decadentists) which only the European Union (EU) still defends in a liberal mode.¹¹ Whatever their official ideology, the fact is that the great powers intervene through state action: either through “sovereign wealth funds” in the case of China, through the special power that the Gulf states represent, through indirect means such as subsidies (Biden), or by acquiring a 10% stake in corporations deemed strategic (Intel and its semiconductors), as Trump’s United States does — though it does not represent a model of state capitalism. 

Without adopting this thesis of the decadence of capitalism as it was put forward by some Marxists in the 1930s, as well as certain groups of the ultraleft, the notion of “shrinking reproduction” that we developed in certain of our writings tends to account for this new regime of growth and the global restabilization that occurred between the various poles of development, particularly with the rise of Asia.¹² It seems more pertinent than the “capitalism of finitude” which, as we critique in our text about extractivism, addresses the question of capital only from the perspective of scarcity and thus, here too, from a physiocratic, naturalistic, and reductionist point of view.

4) The question of how to classify Trump’s politics. Are they the sign of strength, or of weakness? The view of Trump as a fascist aligns with the former, while our position — based on what we’ve seen so far — leans more toward the latter. Still, he was at least able to secure the support of his popular base, even though his constituency is more composite; but through a mixture of incompetence, chaotic disarray, and underestimation of the economic hardships (inflation, skyrocketing health insurance premiums) that he was indirectly inflicting on that same base, Trump has managed to turn a portion of his voters against him. As a result, much of what he undertakes or says — perhaps even the Greenland stunt — serves, ultimately, only to divert attention; whether implicitly or explicitly, he is adopting what the Italian political class of the 1970s called the “strategy of attention” (Aldo Moro), which remained poorly understood because it was overshadowed by another, even more conspicuous strategy, the “strategy of tension.” Except that with the two executions in Minneapolis, these power plays blew up in his face and forced him to backpedal. We must therefore expect a series of recklessly disorganized power plays [coups de force], of “stop and go,” markers of this weakness.

5) Given the above, how should we interpret, politically, the methods of repression used against immigrants and the tactics employed against all protesters and opponents in Minneapolis? To speak, as some do, of Trump’s desire to provoke unrest so as to regain control seems highly speculative.¹³ Trump’s approach certainly views confrontation solely in terms of friends versus enemies, thereby breaking with the traditional democratic model that has guided the United States in the past, except during the era of McCarthyism and the cold war. But with the indiscriminate hunt for undocumented immigrants, it tends to blur the boundaries, since the United States are historically a land of immigration, and immigrants have all eventually been accepted in this country as Americans, even if this was sometimes grudgingly or belatedly (including for the Swedes, who are very numerous in Minnesota). Trump and his team are therefore struggling to portray the current waves of migrants as linked to international terrorism (this is no longer 2001). Latin Americans are not jihadists, just gang members, we’ve recently been informed by government sources. According to some analysts, the anti-immigrant hysteria has, above all, a political value: after the relative disappearance of the previous enemies directed from abroad (jihadists, and before that communists), the deeply divided American right no longer knows which way to turn, and immigration, especially from Latin American, provides it with a unifying theme by linking it to crime. It notably offers the advantage of linking domestic and foreign policy, with the rediscovery of the Monroe Doctrine. This goal this time appears to be more political than economic or geostrategic. A side effect of this inconsistent policy is that Trump and his team have been taken to task by major tech executives, and it is no coincidence that the most vocal critics among them turned out to be the outsiders from OpenAI, Anthropic, LinkedIn, and Reddit; while the dominant players (Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Meta) have held their tongues.¹⁴

6) Do the two logics we’ve noted — that of world governance at capitalism’s summit and that of “greater spaces” — truly stand in opposition to one another, given that the former gives the impression of a “completion of historical time”¹⁵ in which war is no longer a political rupture in history but still persists in a residual form as an opportunity for national ambitions of a bygone era, whereas the second attempts to resurrect that of “grand history” through imperial war for the creation of a new “greater space” (Putin) that resembles a rehash? Put this way, the question is already fraught with uncertainty¹⁶ and assumes that everything ultimately plays out on a geopolitical level without civil war-style clashes (more than class war, for that matter, if one looks at what’s happening in the U.S. and Iran — further disrupting the current great disorder.

Indeterminacy seems more pervasive than the inevitable denouement of a tendency; consequently, critique must remain modest. 

(February 7, 2026)

Afterword 

The American offensive does not signify an expansion of the “Great American Space” into the Middle East, but rather the neutralization of a pawn (Iran), which embodies negativity in contrast to the positivity claimed by the United States as a power on the global geopolitical chessboard.

Our assessment, in point 6, of the balance between “global governance” and the “greater space” (of an imperial nature) is not contradicted by this new development, since there is no imperialist intent on the part of the United States. Indeed, this operation does not correspond to a strategy for a new American hegemony like that of the 1960s, nor, for that matter, to the prospect of establishing a new world order under its domination as during the war against Iraq. A situation that nevertheless seemed appropriate to the concurrent process of globalization. Given the increasingly chaotic nature of this globalization, the failure of the American-led nation-building strategy, and the emergence of zones of influence alongside the Chinese threat, what we are dealing with here is rather an opportunistic move. It proceeds like a “lifting of the lock,” freeing up, for capital, a space (the Middle East and the Gulf States) that was previously restricted (Iraq, Syria, Yemen) or confiscated (South Lebanon) by a hostile counter-space (Iran), which has taken advantage of the disintegration of the Middle Eastern nation-states to acquire an “unnatural” position as a regional power (a vast, densely populated country of Persian civilization, seeking to dominate, from the vantage point of an ultra-minority religious faction of Islam, a large Arab bloc with a Sunni Muslim majority). Secondly, it so happens that this opportunistic action also serves the State of Israel’s interests by weakening its adversary and its local proxies, though it can hope for nothing more from a military standpoint. Indeed, its current neocolonial policy does not, here either, reflect any imperialist ambitions on a regional scale; its objective is rather to focus on the fundamentals of its economy: the defense industry and exports, offshore gas, and strong growth in the high-tech sector. This limitation of power is clearly evident in the fact that Trump’s plan for Gaza is completely beyond his grasp, just as are the financial flows linked to the region’s oil and natural gas.

(March 3, 2026)

Translated from the French by Robert Hurley

Images: Yves Daniel