Does Donald Trump want to carve up the world — or keep it all for himself?

Foreign policy experts have struggled to make sense of the second Trump administration's incoherent and contradictory approach to world affairs — which in itself ought to serve as a clue. First of all, it suggests that the Trump team is operating without a recognizable or familiar playbook, driven partly by the Great Leader’s famous whims and fancies and partly by competing streams of ideology. Secondly, it illustrates that the generations of think-tankers churned out by the graduate programs of elite Anglo-American institutions are completely at sea in this bizarre historical moment, whether in foreign policy or any other supposed discipline of governance.

We’ve already worked through the theory that Donald Trump is reviving the expansionist foreign policy of Gilded Age America and William McKinley, who isn’t just a deeply inappropriate presidential role model for the 2020s but also an inexplicably strange one. (What schoolbook or outdated world map or old-school history teacher of Trump’s 1950s childhood is responsible for his McKinley love affair?) That seems partly true, or at least serves to explain Trump’s self-destructive fascination with tariffs, along with his obsessive interest in retaking the Panama Canal, purchasing or seizing Greenland and, um, “annexing” Canada (or something like that).

We have to assume that someone or other, quite likely Stephen Miller — whose title is deputy chief of staff, but by some accounts is making all the policy decisions normally associated with, you know, being president — has gently informed Trump that the Panama and Greenland things would be major international incidents that might derail his otherwise glorious reign, while the Canada thing simply isn’t happening at all. So these topics have gradually receded toward the back burner, along with his genuinely horrifying brainstorm about turning Gaza into a beach resort, without disappearing entirely.

It’s important to recognize that in world affairs, as in the pettiest of personal concerns, none of Trump’s idées fixes ever completely go away. He forced Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney to sit through a jovial, not-quite-joking discussion of the Great White North as the 51st state. (Which, I’m sorry, not to be that guy, but that isn’t even right. Canada has 10 provinces and three federal territories; aren’t we talking about the 51st through 60th states, plus or minus?)

He still wants someone to prove that a deceased Venezuelan president, Italian satellites and the deep-state libs of the FBI stole the 2020 election. (I may not up on the latest theories; my apologies.) He, or more plausibly some eager-to-please groveling toady, actually wants school children to study the so-called evidence of that enormous history-shaping crime, which may involve the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. I guarantee he’s still mad about the Sharpie-hurricane incident.

So let’s not pretend that McKinleyist neo-imperialism is gone forever, but for a while there it seemed superseded by an overtly ideological program of right-wing global conquest, which to this point has gone remarkably poorly. This feels more like Elon Musk and JD Vance’s collective genius at work than Trump’s. Sure, he’s flattered by obvious right-wing analogues and imitators like Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Javier Milei in Argentina, but he thinks of his relationships with other leaders almost entirely in individual and transactional terms.

Ideology, for Trump, is nothing more than the sales pitch, or the decoration on top of the cake; it’s not the “deal,” by which he means a bunch of pomp and circumstance, ending with someone else’s obsequious surrender and shameless flattery. He was over the moon about meeting Kim Jong-un during his first term, and no doubt still thinks that went well. He transparently believes he’d have gotten along smashingly with Hitler and Stalin, and it’s a shame he wasn’t around to help defuse World War II and the Cold War.

Of course Trump would have happily taken credit for supporting the far-right AfD in Germany or the right-wing parties and candidates in Canada, Australia, Romania and Poland — if any of them had won. (To be clear, Poland’s presidential election still hangs in the balance, with the final round of voting this weekend.) But at least so far, exported Trumpism has encountered high electoral tariffs across the liberal-democratic zone, delivering an unexpected and arguably unmerited booster shot to mainstream “centrist” parties — with the solitary and instructive exception (as I recently observed) of Britain, where the political climate has gone from pretty bad to a whole lot worse.

Electoral democracy isn’t really Trump’s bag anyway, given the unacceptably high risk of losing. (I recognize the potentially terrifying subtext of that sentence.) He leaves that stuff to the nerds, which brings us to his recent tour through plutocratic oil states of the Middle East and his well-attested preference for leaders who don’t need to worry about that nonsense. In Saudi Arabia, now run by the youthful modernizer (and journalist-dismemberer) Mohammad bin Salman, Trump delivered a speech proclaiming that under his aegis the U.S. was no longer interested in looking “into the souls of foreign leaders” and dispensing justice based on their perceived morality.

That Teleprompter-ready rhetoric doesn’t remotely resemble anything our president would say in a more natural context, but never mind. The point was taken: We’re done pretending to care about human rights and democracy and all that airy-fairy woke stuff from the Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution! We’re here to do some blatantly underhanded business deals and take an outdated gas-guzzling 747 off your hands.

With this, we saw the launch of a new theory-balloon within the foreign-policy establishment: Trump is bringing back “spheres of influence” as a guiding principle in world affairs, and those who bend the knee to America — or to him, which is the same thing — get to run their own s**thole countries however they like.

As with the McKinley business, my verdict is: Sure, sort of. It’s certainly conceivable that Trump has encountered some nostalgic-heroic retelling of the “Great Game” of the 19th century, when the British and French empires sought to carve up the underdeveloped nations between them, and then Germany, Belgium, Italy, Russia and Austria-Hungary got into the act. (McKinley’s clumsy territorial grabs can be understood as America getting into the poker game a few sessions late.) He clearly would neither know nor care that, considered as a whole, that diabolical contest probably produced the greatest set of crimes in human history, or that the migrant “crisis” now afflicting every major Western-style democracy amounts to its long-tail karmic blowback.

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Trump has a distinct fondness for exotic and fanciful narratives, and God knows the colonial-imperial period offered plenty of those. No doubt he’d find a hypothetical Second Great Game thrilling, on the level of pure fantasy: He may imagine Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping and himself meeting over brandy and cigars at (let’s say) the Schönbrunn Palace and congratulating each other for being great men of history who get to make great-man decisions about who owns what. Except that Trump doesn’t take brandy or cigars — which ruins the whole fantasy, honestly — and Putin and Xi know better, at this point, than to take Trump seriously.

There are a number of potentially fatal problems with this dusted-off 19th-century throwback, as studiously laid out by Sarang Shidore of the Quincy Institute in a lengthy essay for Foreign Policy. I would summarize them this way: LOL this is Trump we’re talking about; never in a million years. Yet it's also true that the “spheres of influence” model has a perverse appeal that goes well beyond aspiring dictators into various quarters on the left: It recognizes that we live in a multipolar world, and strikes many international observers as less hypocritical than the “rules-based order” so piously advocated by former Secretary of State Tony Blinken, which amounted to old-school U.S. hegemony dressed up in contemporary drag.

Although the Biden administration “occasionally gave a rhetorical nod to multipolarity,” Shidore writes,

its policies on the ground were to maintain U.S. domination globally and in all dimensions of power: military, economic, and institutional. The new administration’s clearer acknowledgement of multipolarity is a promising beginning to reforming U.S. foreign policy.

In the first weeks of Trump’s second term, you could see the vague outlines of a “spheres of influence” policy shaping up: He’d let Russia keep as much Ukrainian territory as it could conquer, and was manifestly unbothered by the prospect of China invading Taiwan. All he wanted in return was Canada!

One can almost imagine a more clear-headed and ruthless version of Trump who sticks to that kind of hardcore realpolitik and gets away with it. I said “almost.” Trump’s iron grip on the Republican Party is a function of his irrationality, his limitless egotism and his mercurial whims. Those same ingredients make him utterly ineffectual as a world leader.

His efforts to extort some kind of “peace deal” from Putin — which Trump repeatedly claimed he could accomplish in 24 hours — have descended to online pouting and whining. ("Vladimir, STOP!" is not exactly Great Game material.) His exhausting trade war with China has accomplished nothing, except to convince Xi’s unappetizing but highly rational regime that negotiating with this dude is pointless. For the moment, Trump has been shoved halfway back into the arms of Republican chickenhawks, the enfeebled tools of the military-industrial complex who no doubt suspected this would happen all along. I honestly can't tell you whether that's better or worse: Pick your poison.

Thing is, if you want to carve up the world into competing zones controlled by “great powers,” you need other great powers who want to carve it up with you, and you need a world full of smaller countries who are willing to go along or too weak to resist. Those things do not exist in 2025, and thank Christ for small mercies. Oh, and by the way: You also need to be a great power. I suppose the U.S. still technically qualifies, but not for much longer.