The “Sinatra Doctrine”

It seems clear that the world has stopped being unipolar. As a result, the United States is no longer able to be decisively influential throughout the international landscape, including on those issues that concern it. Perhaps because of that, China and Russia now want to insist on the notion that they both have a special right to a sort of monopoly on the management of their respective geographic “spheres of influence” — in their respective “neighborhoods,” that is, in what some would call their respective “backyards” — where nothing significant, in geopolitical terms, should be able to occur “behind the backs” of these two powers.

In that way, they claim a sort of veto right on foreign policy matters, in the manner of the Monroe Doctrine that was born around 1823, and which the current U.S. secretary of state himself considers dead. From the “spheres of influence” comes the Russian Federation’s opposition to Ukraine joining NATO soon, which to it is a kind of intolerable “change of herd,” even though to Ukrainians, NATO is, on the contrary, an anchor for the defense of their freedom.

China and Russia both operate according to said parameter of “spheres of influence”; increasingly so, and hence, their absolute rejection of the American military presence, as well as that of NATO, in or near those “spheres of influence.”

To that effect, they are now preparing to send a message to the West, by announcing that next year, they will carry out joint naval exercises in the Mediterranean Sea, for the first time in history. This carries a clear message: If the U.S. or NATO have a presence in our “spheres of influence,” China and Russia feel at complete liberty to exert a military appearance even in the Mediterranean Sea itself.

With the “spheres of influence” criterion as a dogma of its own gospel, Russia is spearheading the creation of a new economic zone, called by some the “Euro-Asiatic Union,” with the dimensions the defunct Soviet Union once had, and inviting China to take part in it.

There is, in addition, a recent change in discourse — and attitude — in China and Russia. The arguments they now use are not only economic, but they are geopolitical as well, and increasingly, they are linked to the always-delicate question of international peace and security. Obviously, they have a high impact on the varied disputes on sovereignty over the sea, which remain open, as well as on matters of airspace jurisdiction, especially in the Chinese case.

The U.S., for its part, rejects the theory of the “spheres of influence.” Every country, it says, has the right to freely elect its own alliances, with full independence from regional powers, because the opposite would be the same as accepting that regional powers have some kind of “veto right” on foreign policy matters over medium-sized or small states in their region, which would be an unacceptable limitation of their sovereignty.

As a result, those Asian countries that distrust China and wish to obtain American military support are free to do so. Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines are current examples of this situation. The same can be said of the U.S. military presence in Japan, South Korea, Bahrain or Qatar, and that of NATO throughout old Europe, which visibly irritates China and the Russian Federation.

Something similar appears to be happening in our own Latin America, with the increasingly strong military ties that bind countries such as Venezuela and Nicaragua with the Russian Federation, which so far, have not generated strong or irate reactions from the Americans.

Because of this, the Russians say that Americans, in fact, pursue what they call the “Sinatra Doctrine,” thus recalling the song “I Did It My Way,” which Frank Sinatra immortalized. The unusual — but bitingly sarcastic — definition, translated into common language, means that as far as the U.S. is concerned, every country has the power to choose, with total freedom, the allies or coalitions it wants to have, with full independence from the desires that their respective regional powers may or may not have on the matter.

This is not new. It is simply insisting on nothing less than the basic principle of the “sovereign equality of all states,” which is the very existential foundation of the international community, and which has also been expressly recognized in the Charter of the United Nations itself, in Article 2.1. This is no small thing.