A Multipolar World
Yes, I know. Russia hoax. Conspiracy theory. Derangement syndrome. Call it whatever makes you comfortable dismissing documented evidence. But before you do, ask yourself: if Trump weren’t compromised, why does every action serve Putin’s openly stated goals? Coincidence can only stretch so far before it snaps.
I just read Andreas Kluth’s framework for understanding Trump’s foreign policy (Bloomberg) and it suggests Trump operates like a medieval monarch extracting tribute from weaker nations for his clique’s enrichment but that framing has a fatal flaw. However, it cannot account for why Trump systematically weakens American power while strengthening Russia’s position and enabling China’s rise. A king extracting tribute does not torch his own castle.
A more obvious framework that actually explains Trump’s behavior is that he is advancing Putin’s explicitly stated vision of a multipolar world carved into spheres of influence. America runs its hemisphere. China runs Asia and the Pacific. Russia controls the former Soviet space and much of Europe. Each power dominates its region without interference from the others.
Putin has been public about this vision since his 2007 Munich speech, where he first challenged American unipolarity. He declared that one state, the United States, had overstepped its national boundaries in every sphere, and that the economic potential of new centers of global growth would inevitably be converted into political influence and strengthen multipolarity. He repeated this vision at the UN in 2015, at Davos in 2021, in addresses to the Russian parliament. He has called openly for a new Yalta, referencing the 1945 conference where Stalin secured dominion over Eastern Europe. Putin once called the collapse of that arrangement the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the twentieth century. His advisers describe his understanding of global order as one where great power spheres of influence help avoid war, and have characterized Putin as envisioning himself as a modern Churchill in a Big Three arrangement with Washington and Beijing.
Now watch everything Trump does through that lens. It stops looking chaotic. It becomes methodical.
Trump’s actions in the Western Hemisphere mirror Putin’s territorial expansion playbook while normalizing the premise that great powers simply take what they want in their spheres. His January 2026 invasion of Venezuela seized control of the country’s oil reserves. Trump explicitly stated America would run Venezuela and that its vast oil wealth would flow to the United States as reimbursement. He said the U.S. would be running the country until a proper transition could take place, that he was not afraid of boots on the ground, and that U.S. oil companies would go in to rebuild the badly broken infrastructure. This is Crimea logic applied to the Caribbean Basin.
His threats to annex Greenland included explicit statements about using military force against a NATO ally. In January 2026, Trump announced tariffs of 10 percent, rising to 25 percent in June, on Denmark, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Finland unless they stopped opposing his efforts to take control of Greenland. He told the Norwegian prime minister that he no longer felt an obligation to think purely of peace, attributing his attitude to not being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Senator Lisa Murkowski called the tariffs unnecessary, punitive, and a profound mistake, warning they would push core European allies further away while doing nothing to advance U.S. national security. Russia welcomed the tariffs against NATO allies, with Kremlin officials saying it was evidence that the transatlantic alliance was collapsing. The Russian government newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta praised Trump’s push to take over Greenland and welcomed the strain it was causing between the U.S. and Europe.
His repeated calls for Canada to become the 51st state have been paired with 25 percent tariffs on all Canadian goods. Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly told CNN that President Trump wants to put Canada into a state where it is much more weakened economically in order eventually to annex us. Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon said publicly that Canada could be the next Ukraine, meaning a neighbor pressured into submission to a great power’s sphere of influence.
Trump is demonstrating that America should focus on dominating its own neighborhood through force and economic coercion. This is precisely what Putin believes Russia should do in the former Soviet space.
While Trump encourages America to behave like a regional imperial power, he simultaneously withdraws American resistance to Russia doing exactly the same thing.
On Ukraine, the deliverables for Putin are comprehensive. Trump withheld military aid in 2019, an act that led to his first impeachment. He has stated explicitly that Ukraine will never be allowed to join NATO, which is Putin’s core demand. In an interview with Time Magazine in April 2025, Trump said he did not think Ukraine would ever be able to join NATO and blamed Kyiv’s aspirations for Russia’s invasion. In August 2025, he told Zelensky via social media that there was no getting back Crimea and no going into NATO by Ukraine. In November 2025, the White House presented a 28 point peace plan that would require Ukraine to enshrine in its constitution that it will not join NATO and would require NATO to agree to include in its statutes a provision that Ukraine will not be admitted in the future.
Trump blamed Ukraine for the war by seeking NATO membership, adopting Russia’s narrative completely. He has signaled that Crimea belongs to Russia permanently, saying Crimea will stay with Russia and that Zelensky understands that. The draft peace plan would recognize all of Crimea, Luhansk, and Donetsk as de facto Russian, with Kherson and Zaporizhzhia following to the extent Russia occupies them.
In late February 2025, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered U.S. Cyber Command to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions. Multiple outlets including the Washington Post, NBC News, and CBS News confirmed the directive. The order halted operations that were disrupting Russian election interference and defending American infrastructure. Chuck Schumer called it a bid by Trump to earn Putin’s favor, saying Trump appeared to be giving Russia a free pass as Moscow continued to launch cyber operations and ransomware attacks against critical American infrastructure.
On sanctions, the Trump administration did not join the UK, the EU, and other allies in imposing any new sanctions on Russia during the first nine months of his second term, according to the UK House of Commons Library. In July 2025, the U.S. did not support lowering the oil price cap designed to limit Russian energy revenues funding the war in Ukraine. The administration disbanded Task Force KleptoCapture, the Biden era enforcement initiative that had been behind high profile asset seizures including luxury yachts. Trump lifted restrictions on Hungary’s Russian built nuclear plant project in June 2025.
From Putin’s perspective, Trump is giving Russia a free hand in the former Soviet sphere.
Trump’s actions toward China reveal the same pattern. In December 2025, the Trump administration announced it would allow the sale of Nvidia’s H200 chips to China, reversing the Biden administration’s ban on advanced AI chip shipments. The H200 is roughly 30 percent more powerful than China’s best chip, Huawei’s Ascend 910C. Former State Department official Chris McGuire described the move as a transformational moment for U.S. technology policy. Rush Doshi, a former National Security Council China official, warned that given China’s strengths in engineering and electricity generation, the choice to export American hardware is possibly decisive in the AI race. Senator Elizabeth Warren argued that selling these chips risks turbocharging China’s bid for technological and military dominance. In August 2025, Trump approved exports of Nvidia’s H20 chip to China after CEO Jensen Huang lobbied the president directly, despite the H20 being formidable for deploying AI models and with at least 1.3 million chips destined for Chinese buyers. This makes no sense for American national security. It makes perfect sense if Trump is enabling China to dominate its sphere while expecting Beijing not to interfere in American and Russian spheres.
The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy, released in November 2025, envisions Canada and other Western hemispheric states as virtual vassals of the U.S. and is notably far less hostile to Russia than to the European Union, which Trump has cast as a decaying project of the old liberal order. Axios summarized the emerging doctrine succinctly. In Trump’s model of great power coexistence, spheres of influence are the price of stability.
NATO is the primary obstacle to Putin’s European sphere of influence. If NATO remains strong and united, Russia cannot dominate Eastern Europe and the former Soviet republics. Putin needs NATO fractured.
Trump has discussed withdrawing from NATO entirely. His own officials noted this would fulfill many of Putin’s long held ambitions. In January 2026, he said it may be a choice whether to preserve NATO or seize Greenland and that he no longer felt an obligation to think purely of peace.
But the most devastating blow to Western unity is what Trump has done to intelligence sharing. The Five Eyes alliance, the bedrock of Western security cooperation for over seventy years, is in crisis.
In January 2025, Trump restricted intelligence sharing on Russia and Ukraine, cutting allies out of negotiations and freezing certain channels entirely. In March came the so called Ukraine intel blackout, an unprecedented freeze that shut Britain and Australia out of updates on Russian troop movements. In July 2025, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard signed a directive barring the sharing of information on ongoing Russia Ukraine peace talks with Five Eyes countries, limiting distribution to information that had already been publicly released.
In October 2025, Dutch intelligence officials stated publicly that they sometimes don’t share information anymore due to concerns about politicization. Eric Akerboom, director of the Dutch Intelligence and Security Service, said sharing is now considered on a case by case basis and that they are very alert to the politicization of intelligence and to human rights violations.
In November 2025, the United Kingdom suspended intelligence sharing with the United States in the Caribbean because it does not want to be complicit in U.S. military strikes and believes the attacks are illegal. CNN reported that London has now completely suspended intelligence sharing in the Caribbean. The Spectator reported that Trump treats intelligence as leverage, a tool to reward countries that fall in line with Washington and punish those that don’t. In his hands, intelligence and secrets have become bargaining chips.
Consider what this means. American allies will not share intelligence with America because they think it will reach Russia, while Trump is actively working to share American intelligence with Russia. The Five Eyes was created specifically to counter Soviet intelligence during the Cold War. Trump is dismantling it from within while exploring direct intelligence sharing with Moscow. Putin no longer needs to infiltrate Western intelligence. Trump is destroying the alliance structure and handing Putin access simultaneously.
The leverage Putin holds over Trump makes this arrangement durable. After Trump’s 2008 bankruptcies, Deutsche Bank was his only major lender. The bank loaned Trump over two billion dollars despite defaults and lawsuits. During the exact same period, Russian state bank Gazprombank deposited over 500 million dollars into the Deutsche Bank subsidiary handling Trump’s loans. Deutsche Bank was simultaneously facilitating ten billion dollars in Russian money laundering through the same legal entity managing Trump’s accounts. At least thirteen Russian mobsters with KGB and FSB ties purchased properties in Trump buildings. Trump made a deliberate decision not to verify their connections to Russian organized crime.
Trump was actively negotiating Trump Tower Moscow throughout the 2016 campaign while publicly denying any Russian business. He signed a letter of intent in October 2015. His attorney contacted Putin’s spokesman directly. The negotiations continued at least through June 2016, possibly until Election Day. Putin knew Trump was lying about Russian connections. That created massive leverage.
Trump’s campaign chairman was Paul Manafort. The bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee explicitly identified Manafort as a grave counterintelligence threat due to ties to Russian intelligence. Manafort worked for Russia’s preferred candidate in Ukraine for nearly a decade. He helped elect Yanukovych, whose first act was barring Ukraine from NATO membership. The Senate found Manafort’s key aide, Konstantin Kilimnik, was a Russian intelligence officer. This Russian intelligence asset ran Trump’s presidential campaign.
Trump has never criticized Putin in forty years. The New York Times documented Trump attacking 351 different people, places, and things between July 2015 and August 2017. Putin alone received consistent deference. When Russia expelled 755 American embassy staff, Trump thanked Putin for saving money. At Helsinki in 2018, Trump held private talks with Putin with only translators present, then sided with Putin against American intelligence agencies on election interference. John McCain called it one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.
In May 2017, Trump shared highly classified Israeli intelligence with Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov in the Oval Office, information so sensitive that America had to extract a covert source from within Russia because Trump’s mishandling put the source at risk.
At the end of Trump’s first term, a ten inch binder containing raw intelligence about Russians and Russian agents, including sources and methods showing Putin helped Trump win, went missing. It has never been recovered.
The nature of Putin’s leverage may extend beyond financial entanglement and missing intelligence files. In February 2026 (when I wrote this) Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk announced a special investigation into whether Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation was a Russian intelligence operation, stating that more and more commentators and experts assume it is very probable this was a prepared operation by the Russian KGB, the so-called honey trap. Former MI6 Russia desk chief Christopher Steele told LBC it was very likely Epstein was paid by Moscow to gather kompromat and that the majority of his investment funds could have come from the Soviet Union and then Russia.
The Epstein files released by the Justice Department show 4,725 wire transfers totaling nearly $1.1 billion from a single account, with multiple Russian banks now under sanctions processing payments related to sex trafficking. Many victims came from Russia, Belarus, Turkey, and Turkmenistan. Epstein maintained email correspondence about possible meetings with Vladimir Putin and his circle. His longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell was the daughter of Robert Maxwell, a media tycoon suspected by British, Israeli, and American intelligence of working as a triple agent for Mossad, KGB, and MI6. The elder Maxwell was given a state funeral in Israel in 1991, with Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir declaring he had done more for Israel than can today be said.
Trump’s relationship with Epstein was extensive and well documented. They socialized together for over fifteen years. Trump flew on Epstein’s private jets seven times between 1993 and 1997. They were photographed together repeatedly at parties with young women, including at Mar-a-Lago in 1992, 1997, and 2000. In a 2002 interview, Trump called Epstein a terrific guy and noted that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. Virginia Giuffre, one of Epstein’s trafficking victims, was recruited while working as a locker room attendant at Mar-a-Lago in 2000. Epstein’s brother Mark wrote in an email asking if Putin has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba. In January 2019, during Trump’s first presidency, Epstein allegedly wrote that Trump knew about the girls and asked Ghislaine Maxwell to stop bringing them to Mar-a-Lago.
If the Epstein operation was Russian intelligence gathering kompromat on Western elites, Putin would hold material on Trump far more devastating than business debts. Christopher Steele stated he believes Epstein and subsequently the Russians who were handling him had kompromat on Trump, calling it quite likely though suggesting some files may have been destroyed. The honey trap is classic KGB tradecraft. Compromise, record, control. Trump has never explained why he wished Ghislaine Maxwell well after her arrest or why he has refused to rule out pardoning her. The relationship, the timeline, the photos, the victims recruited at his property, and Epstein’s own statements create exactly the leverage profile intelligence services engineer for long-term control of assets.
Russia and China have been explicit about their joint goal. Replace American dominance with a multipolar order, erode American power globally, weaken American alliances, shift regional military balances in their favor, undermine international confidence in American credibility. Putin has repeatedly elevated the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, which includes Russia, China, Iran, India, Pakistan, and Central Asian states, as the framework to replace what he calls obsolete Euro Atlantic models.
Trump is making this vision real.
He is repositioning America as a hemispheric power focused on territorial expansion and resource extraction in its own neighborhood. He is withdrawing American resistance to Russian and Chinese expansion in their spheres. He is destroying the alliance structures that enabled American global leadership. He is normalizing great power territorial aggression. He is dismantling intelligence cooperation that countered Russian and Chinese operations. Everything he does advances the multipolar sphere of influence world that Putin and Xi have openly said they are working to create.
When asked by the New York Times in January 2026 whether anything could stop him from taking Greenland, Trump replied that the only thing that could stop him was his own morality and his own mind. He said he did not need international law. The Times noted that his assessment was the most blunt acknowledgment yet of his worldview, at its core the concept that national strength rather than laws, treaties, and conventions should be the deciding factor as powers collide.
This is Putin’s worldview precisely. And Trump is implementing it.
The Kluth framework suggesting Trump extracts wealth for his clique through arbitrary tributes misses the strategic coherence entirely. Yes, Trump’s family business has made four billion dollars since he returned to office. But the money is not the driver. The money is how Putin maintains control over a compromised asset who delivers strategic value worth infinitely more than any business deals.
Trump is not acting like a medieval king extracting tribute. He is acting like a Russian asset executing a strategic plan to dismantle American global leadership and enable the multipolar world order that Putin has pursued for two decades. That framework explains everything. Helsinki. The missing binder. Deutsche Bank. Venezuela. Manafort. The Five Eyes crisis. NATO threats. The cyber operations suspension. The chip sales to China. The peace plan that gives Russia everything it demanded.
It is not chaos. It is strategy. And it is Putin’s strategy, executed through Trump.
The only other possibility is that he is fucking nuts…