In recent months, a growing consensus has emerged that the liberal international order is collapsing and being replaced by a club of great powers, each entitled to supremacy over a distinct sphere of influence. In this view, as U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration aggressively asserts its control over the Americas, it appears content to stand by as Russia pushes westward into Europe and as China extends its influence across Asia and the Pacific.

Like the United States and Russia, China wants to increase its power and decrease that of its competitors, and it has concerns about foreign powers acting within or around its territory. However, it is a mistake to think that China shares these states’ desires or would even tolerate a world divided into spheres of influence.

Such a view both overstates and understates the scope of Beijing’s interests and ambition, which are primarily economic rather than militaristic and global rather than regional. Worse, the assumption makes it harder to recognize a real, potentially destabilizing source of geopolitical risk: attempts to exclude China from the global economy.

Officially, Beijing has rejected “blocs” and “hegemony” for decades. Although Mao Zedong initially positioned China as a member of Soviet camp during the Cold War, rising tensions with Moscow and the geopolitical benefits of engaging with nonaligned countries—and later, the United States—shifted China’s foreign policy toward flexibility and opportunism. As China’s reach has grown, so has its insistence that great powers should not carve up the world into spheres. Of course, official rhetoric cannot be taken at face value—China has supported Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, for example—but neither can it be dismissed, especially when Chinese strategy documents do not depict spheres of influence as legitimate or desirable.

Those who argue that China welcomes a world divided into spheres often point to Beijing’s aggression toward Taiwan as a prime example. Indeed, China routinely engages in intelligence operations, military exercises, gray-zone tactics, and cyber warfare intended to intimidate the people of Taiwan, and it has punished countries that defy Beijing’s interpretation of the “One China” policy. But Beijing regards Taiwan—and the South China Sea and East China Sea—as matters of sovereignty, not as part of its sphere of influence, and condemns what it calls the “internationalization” of these issues.

The key issue is whether China extends this monopolistic logic to neighbors whose sovereignty it formally recognizes. Evidence suggests that it does not. Afghanistan, for instance, could be an excellent candidate for Chinese vassalage: It is weak, politically fragmented, rich in strategic resources, and shares a border with China. It also bears directly on Chinese domestic security because of the presence of Chinese-designated Uyghur terrorists in the country, as well as the Islamic State-Khorasan, which has killed multiple Chinese nationals in recent years.

Nevertheless, Beijing has been cautious. It has withheld economic investment rather than taking direct military action, even expressing concern about the consequences of the United States’ withdrawal on regional security. Beijing did not view the decades-long presence of U.S. troops across its western border as an unalloyed good, but it was happy to have Washington take the lead in providing security and fighting terrorism there—hardly the behavior that we would expect from a government seeking a sphere of influence.

A similar pattern appears in continental Southeast Asia. China is the region’s largest trading partner; an aggressive party to territorial disputes; and a key player in regional diplomacy, security provision, and military cooperation.

Yet even here, China has accepted hedging rather than rather than demanding exclusive alignment. Apart from its brief invasion of Vietnam in 1979, China has not invaded or overthrown rival-aligned regimes in Southeast Asia as the United States has done in Latin America and Russia has done in Eastern Europe. Even as Beijing publicly protests Thailand’s military cooperation with the United States, it quietly benefits from it because it makes Thailand and its access to the Indian Ocean more stable and secure.

In response to Washington’s economic and diplomatic inroads in Vietnam, Beijing has sought to strengthen its bilateral ties with Hanoi rather than resorting to punishment. China certainly does not welcome foreign influence and leverages its economic and military heft in its territorial disputes with Vietnam and other regional states, but it is not attempting to expel the United States or other countries from its backyard.

In stark contrast to Russia and the United States, China has not shown a willingness to bear the high material and political costs required to exclude rival powers from the region. It might accept a sphere of influence for free, but it doesn’t want to pay for one, which is what matters when trying to anticipate Chinese strategy.

Projecting a desire for spheres of influence onto China also underestimates the scope of its interests and influence farther afield. China trumpets itself as a global power. It has invested heavily in its ability to shape established international organizations and created a new generation of China-centered international forums and global initiatives. China’s recent claims to leadership in the global south are also quite telling: This vague and geographically flexible category is useful precisely because it enables China to expand its ties with developing countries around the world.

China’s leaders see integration with and increasing influence over the international system as indispensable to their country’s development and their regime’s legitimacy. China needs to export vast quantities of products around the world to sustain economic growth, and it has invested huge sums to develop foreign markets that can consume what Chinese consumers cannot.

Its impressive domestic production notwithstanding, China is also a net importer of food and hydrocarbons and has diversified its supply chains to shore up its energy and food security—meaning, in effect, that it needs to maintain and enhance its influence in different regions, not just in its own backyard.

In short, China would not accept a world divided into spheres of influence because global economic integration is its core strategy for survival.

Today, geopolitical risk cannot be mitigated by drawing lines on a map, because the two strongest players—the United States and China—both operate at genuinely global scale: in the interests they pursue, the strategies by which they pursue them, and the weapons that they deploy when those strategies are frustrated.

While the United States’ economic, diplomatic, and military approaches to power have been relatively clear for decades, China’s arsenal is newer and more limited. China is viewed more unfavorably than favorably, particularly in developed countries and the Asia-Pacific region, and it has struggled to cultivate enduring soft power. Formidable efforts at military modernization still have not given Beijing anything close to Washington’s reach, though its diplomatic capital has improved this past year in light of the Trump administration’s unpredictability.

Where China has a powerful, recently tested weapon with global reach is in the economic realm: specifically, its control over refined critical minerals. Beijing made a show of this in October, when it announced sweeping export controls on certain rare earths, forcing the Trump administration to the negotiating table. Beijing’s actions were interpreted as a sign that China was now truly a peer competitor with the United States, able and willing to act at global scale—not through military action, but through supply-chain dominance.

These export controls defied the logic of spheres of influence, both in the extent of their impact, which threatened economies around the world, and in what motivated them in the first place. Although some China hawks in Washington were quick to suggest that China had been keen to demonstrate its grip on the global economy, the reality is more complicated. This demonstration was diplomatically costly for China, which had previously cultivated an image as a responsible defender of free trade. Rather than a “global supply-chain power grab,” as U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer characterized the measures, they were a calculated response to a specific action by the United States that China deemed intolerable.

So, what exactly did China believe warranted such a bold and costly response, and what sorts of situations may lead it do so again in the future?

It wasn’t because the United States was threatening China’s neighborhood; it was because the United States was jeopardizing China’s global interests. The weeks prior saw two key developments that deeply concerned Beijing.

First, the U.S. Commerce Department announced an expansion of its “entities list” to include subsidiaries of Chinese parent companies, massively increasing the number of firms requiring oversight and blocked from accessing advanced semiconductors. From Beijing’s point of view, this was a major escalation in Washington’s so-called “technological containment” of China.

Second, in what was widely understood to be a response to this new compliance risk, the Dutch government seized control of semiconductor manufacturer Nexperia. The company is based in the Netherlands but has been owned since 2018 by a Chinese firm partially backed by Chinese state-owned enterprises. Beijing lodged a formal protest with the Dutch government, condemning, among other things, alleged “coercion” by other countries—implicitly, the United States. Not long after, Beijing announced the sweeping new export controls.

The Nexperia affair demonstrates the sort of action that can trigger a globally devastating Chinese response. In contrast to Russia, which has resorted to wars of conquest when it feels threatened by NATO and pro-Western governments around its borders, China hasn’t yet directly sought to push the United States out of Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, or Thailand—or Russia out of Kazakhstan, Mongolia, or North Korea, for that matter. Rather, China struck back when it believed that the United States was enlisting third countries against it in a global trade war and technological competition.

Those who hope that a world divided into spheres will bring stability are likely to be disappointed. Both the United States and China see the ability to pursue their global interests as central to their self-image and economic security. China has shown itself to be far less willing than the United States to use military force abroad, but it is equally willing to weaponize its economic power when its global economic integration is threatened.

This is worrying, because for all its talk of dealmaking, the second Trump administration has repeatedly attempted to exclude China from key nodes of the global economy and enlist third countries in these efforts, whether in the Netherlands, Panama, Peru, or Syria. Beijing has made it clear how it will respond to such exclusion: massive escalation of export controls and restrictions on strategic supply chains. The result, then, may not be a new global order, but a more fragmented and unpredictable one.