The Undesirable "Re-Hierarchization" of the International Order

The historical analogy is recurrent^[1]. To describe a world in which a meagre directory of leaders decides the course of events, one reaches back to the memory of the paradigmatic conference convened in Soviet Crimea in February 1945. On that occasion, Franklin Roosevelt, Josef Stalin, and Winston Churchill sat along the shores of the Black Sea to define, on the basis of oligopoly rather than representativeness, the contours of the post-war international order.

The Yalta Conference is known for having partitioned Europe into spheres of influence. Somewhat paradoxically, it also planted the seeds for an international order built upon the promises of multilateralism, the restriction of the use of force between states, and the universal application of International Law. With the creation of the United Nations, the idea of juridical equality among states was enshrined–imperfect as it was, since it preserved residues of hierarchization: after all, it anointed five allied powers with the status of permanent members of the Security Council, endowed with veto rights over matters pertaining to the maintenance of international peace and security.

Now, the recent evolution of the international order–from the mid-2010s onward, and more pronouncedly since 2022–points toward the accelerated dismantling of the post-war ideals: systematic violations of International Law; the normalization of the use of military force; the resurgence of great-power competition and the return of Realpolitik; the permanent crisis of multilateralism; the consecration of plurilateral arrangements and, worse, the triumph of unilateralism; diminishing incentives for cooperation among states; the sidelining of diplomacy in favor of bravado and confrontation; the unraveling of traditional alliances; contempt for transnational agendas such as environmental protection and climate action; protectionist surges; and "deglobalization"–these are some of the intertwined phenomena challenging the foundations of global governance architecture as we knew it until recently.

The most recent of these phenomena might be the "re-hierarchization" of international relations around a small oligopoly of great powers. In other words, it involves the presumption of superiority–long thought to have been overcome–and the assertion of "special status" vis-à-vis the broader international community, on the grounds of territorial, demographic, and economic dimensions, as well as military muscle. Under this interpretation, a handful of nuclear-armed great powers would arrogate to themselves the prerogative to make self-interested decisions in the name of the collective, frequently in defiance of International Law and to the detriment of peaceful coexistence among nations.

In a "re-hierarchized" international order, arbitrary spheres of influence would be assigned, establishing relations of sovereignty and vassalage between great powers and smaller countries. It also tends to foster the logic of interventionism, whereby the powers that compose the self-proclaimed ruling directory feel at liberty to intervene in the national sovereignty of others.

In a recent article for Foreign Policy, Sarang Shidore (2025) recalls that: "spheres of influence are a type of great-power arrangement for ordering the world. Traditionally, they involve an implicit territorial division among great powers combined with a shared understanding about how to maintain the arrangement and resolve differences." The author concedes that applying the concept to contemporary international reality may run into significant limits, including the existence of "middle powers" unwilling to docilely accept the notion of obedience and subordination to foreign capitals. Additionally, the degree of "shared understanding" among self-appointed great powers may be constrained by the very extent of the competition they wage among themselves.

The emergence of a competitive, anti-isonometric multipolar international order will tend to encourage the pursuit of balance of power through a test of strength, rather than fostering a plural international coexistence that is mindful of the specificities of smaller and less developed countries. In such a competitive environment, the zero-sum dynamic tends, as a rule, to prevail in relations among international actors–that is, one in which the gains of a given side are interpreted as losses by the others.

It would be naïve to imagine that the notion of "informal hierarchy" was ever entirely absent since the establishment of the modern state system. What matters, however, is the degree of formalization of that hierarchy–and, worse still, the shamelessness with which it is practiced. While the asymmetry inscribed in the very DNA of the system remains unquestionable–that is, the existence of countries with admittedly greater or lesser capacity to influence decisions–what we observe today is a rehearsal of a return to the "law of the strongest."

A high cardinal of the realist school of International Relations, Henry Kissinger postulated that, to be stable, the international order must rest on the twin pillars of balance and legitimacy. Should this new, intrinsically hierarchical multipolar order take root, some form of balance may yet be negotiated; legitimacy, however, will be far costlier to achieve. One does not glimpse today, for instance, the emergence of a "global European Concert"–that is, a multipolar order among equivalent powers, as forged by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars. Equally unmistakable is the contrast with the integrationist spirit–"liberal institutionalism" or "globalization," depending on one's vantage point–that prevailed from the fall of the Berlin Wall and the dissolution of the Soviet Union until the mid-2010s.

On the contrary, what we may yet witness is an anomalous combination of the Cold War balance-of-power modus vivendi and a new variant of the kind of European imperialism practiced in the nineteenth century–in the mold of the Great Game, waged between Britain and Russia in Central Asia–and of the Scramble for Africa, insofar as it involves a reedition of competition for mineral resources around the globe.

These are not optimistic scenarios.

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Brazil has a long tradition of defending the principle of sovereign equality among states, which means, in practice, the categorical rejection of extreme hierarchization. Ever since Ruy Barbosa championed the concept before the Second Hague Peace Conference in 1907, it has become an integral part of the conceptual heritage of Brazilian diplomacy.

For countries like Brazil, defenders of stability and adherence to universally agreed international norms, navigating this "new old international order"–one that renounces the lofty principles enshrined in the post-war era and fuses characteristics of ages long since buried–will be, at the very least, a formidable challenge. Balance in the conduct of diplomatic relations and firmness in the defense of national sovereignty are equally assets of Brazilian foreign policy, which, traditionally independent and autonomous, has weathered the tests of time.

From a Brazilian perspective, a plural order will always be preferable–one grounded in stable and predictable global governance, in which cooperation, multilateralism, and International Law prevail over their alternatives. In the phrase he immortalized at The Hague, Barbosa (1907) seems to have glimpsed the third decade of the twenty-first century: "I saw all the nations of the world gathered together, and I learned not to be ashamed of my own. Measuring the great and the powerful at close range, I found them smaller and weaker than justice and the law."

Notes

[1] The ideas expressed in the text do not necessarily reflect the official positions of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

Bibliographic References

Barbosa, Rui. 1907. Speech at the Second International Peace Conference (The Hague). Quoted in Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, "Rui Barbosa in The Hague," institutional website, May 24, 2021. https://www.gov.br/casaruibarbosa/pt-br/acesso-a-informacao/institucional/rui-barbosa/rui-barbosa-em-haia . 

Shidore, Sarang. 2025. “Spheres of Influence Are Not the Answer.” Foreign Policy, May 28, 2025. https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/05/28/spheres-of-influence-great-powers 

Received: August 15, 2025

Accepted for publication: August 21, 2025

Translation published: Month Day, 2026

* Translated by Theo Pereira with the support of digital machine translation tools: Google Translate (initial draft), Grammarly (grammatical and syntactic revision), and ChatGPT (selective phrasing refinements). Reviewed by the author.

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