Trump’s vision: One world, three powers?

President Donald Trump departs to board Marine One as he heads to travel to the Middle East for his first foreign state visit on the South Lawn at the White House in Washington, D.C. on Monday, May 12, 2025. (Eric Lee/The New York Times)

By Edward Wong

For President Donald Trump, anytime is a good time for dealmaking, but never more so than now with the leaders of China and Russia.

Last Monday, Trump said he wanted to normalize commerce with Russia, appearing to lessen the pressure on Moscow to settle its war with Ukraine. And he is trying to limit the fallout from his own global trade war by urging China’s leader to call him.

“We all want to make deals,” Trump said in a recent interview with Time magazine. “But I am this giant store. It’s a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there.”

Trump may have something even bigger in mind involving Russia and China, and it would be the ultimate deal.

His actions and statements suggest he might be envisioning a world in which each of the three so-called great powers — the United States, China and Russia — dominates its part of the globe, some foreign policy analysts say.

It would be a throwback to a 19th-century style of imperial rule.

Trump has said he wants to take Greenland from Denmark, annex Canada and reestablish U.S. control of the Panama Canal. Those bids to extend U.S. dominance in the Western Hemisphere are the clearest signs yet of his desire to create a sphere of influence in the nation’s backyard.

He has criticized allies and talked about withdrawing U.S. troops from around the globe. That could benefit Russia and China, which seek to diminish the U.S. security presence in Europe and Asia. Trump often praises President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Xi Jinping, China’s leader, as strong and smart men who are his close friends.

To that end, Trump has been trying to formalize Russian control of some Ukrainian territory — and U.S. access to Ukraine’s minerals — as part of a potential peace deal that critics say would effectively carve up Ukraine, similar to what great powers did in the age of empires. Trump and Putin spoke about Ukraine in a two-hour phone call last week.

“The tone and spirit of the conversation were excellent,” Trump wrote on social media.

Monica Duffy Toft, a professor of international politics at Tufts University’s Fletcher School, said that the leaders of the United States, Russia and China are all striving for “an imaginary past that was freer and more glorious.”

“Commanding and extending spheres of influence appears to restore a fading sense of grandeur,” she wrote in a new essay in Foreign Affairs magazine. The term “spheres of influence” originated at the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, in which European powers adopted a formal plan to carve up Africa.

Some close observers of Trump, including officials from his first administration, caution against thinking his actions and statements are strategic. While Trump might have strong, long-held attitudes about a handful of issues, notably immigration and trade, he does not have a vision of a world order, they argue.

Yet there are signs that Trump and perhaps some of his aides are thinking in the manner that emperors once did when they conceived of spheres of influence.

“The best evidence is Trump’s desire to expand America’s overt sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere,” said Stephen Wertheim, a historian of U.S. foreign policy at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

But setting up a sphere of influence in the post-imperial age is not easy, even for a superpower.

Last month, Canadians elected an anti-Trump prime minister, Mark Carney, whose Liberal Party appeared destined to lose the election until Trump talked aggressively about Canada. Leaders of Greenland, an autonomous territory of Denmark, have rejected the idea of U.S. control. Chinese officials are threatening to stop a Hong Kong company from selling its business running two ports in the Panama Canal to U.S. investors.

“China will not give up its stakes in the Western Hemisphere so easily without a fight,” said Yun Sun, a China analyst at the Stimson Center in Washington.

Even so, Trump and his aides persist in trying to exert greater U.S. influence from the Arctic Circle to South America’s Patagonia region. When Carney told Trump this month in the Oval Office that Canada was “not for sale,” Trump replied: “Never say never.”

In March, Vice President JD Vance visited a U.S. military base in Greenland to reiterate Trump’s desire to take the territory.

And it is no coincidence that Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s two most substantial trips since taking office have been to Latin America and the Caribbean.

In El Salvador, Rubio negotiated with Nayib Bukele, the strongman leader, to have the nation imprison immigrants deported by the U.S. government, setting up what is effectively a U.S. penal colony. Rubio also pressed Panama on its ports.

During that trip to the region, Rubio was asked by a reporter whether administration officials had discussed setting up spheres of influence, which would entail negotiating limits on each superpower’s footprint, including in Asia.

Rubio, who has more conventional foreign policy views than Trump, asserted that the United States would maintain its military alliances in Asia. Those alliances allow it to base troops across the region.

“We don’t talk about spheres of influence,” he said. “The United States is an Indo-Pacific nation. We have relationships with Japan, South Korea, the Philippines. We’re going to continue those relationships.”

Some analysts say Trump’s approach to the war in Ukraine is consistent with the concept of spheres of influence. The United States is talking to another large power — Russia — about how to define the borders of a smaller country and is itself trying to control natural resources.

Trump has proposed terms of a settlement that would mostly benefit Russia, including U.S. recognition of Russian sovereignty over Crimea and acknowledgment of Russian occupation of large swaths of eastern Ukraine. Last week, Trump even seemed to back off his demand that Russia agree to an immediate ceasefire with Ukraine. Earlier, he got Ukraine to sign an agreement to give U.S. companies access to the country’s minerals.

Supporters of Trump’s settlement proposal say it reflects the reality on the ground, as Ukraine struggles to oust the Russian occupiers.

But Trump’s praise of Putin and of Russia, and his persistent skepticism of America’s role in NATO, has inflamed anxieties among European nations over a potentially waning U.S. presence in their geographic sphere.

The same is true of Taiwan and Asian security. Trump has voiced enough criticism of the island over the years, and showered enough accolades on Xi, that Taiwanese and U.S. officials wonder whether he would waver on U.S. arms support for Taiwan, which is mandated by a congressional act.

Trump says he wants to reach a deal with China. Whether that would go beyond tariffs to address issues such as Taiwan and the U.S. military presence in Asia is an open question.

“Beijing would love to have a grand bargain with the U.S. on spheres of influence,” said Sun, the China analyst, and “its first and foremost focus will be on Taiwan.”

Trump administration officials have not detailed how far the United States would go to defend Taiwan in the event of a Chinese invasion. At his confirmation hearing, Elbridge Colby, undersecretary of defense for policy, was asked by Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., why Colby’s stance on defending Taiwan appeared to have “softened” recently.

Colby said Taiwan was “not an existential interest” for the United States and affirmed a vague commitment to Asia: “It’s very important the core American interest is in denying China regional hegemony.”