Donald Trump's foreign policy is not pulling the world in one direction - it is pulling it in three simultaneously incompatible ones. His administration's actions contain the seeds of a new cold war, a spheres-of-influence carve-up, and outright global anarchy, with no clarity on which trajectory will ultimately prevail.

That is the central paradox identified by Hal Brands, a professor at Johns Hopkins and American Enterprise Institute senior fellow, in a sweeping essay for Foreign Policy, "Hvylya" reports.

The cold war elements are real: Trump demands higher allied military spending, presses critical-minerals partnerships to escape China's chokehold, and has "bloodied the autocratic axis" by targeting its weaker members in Iran and Venezuela. These moves could strengthen the democratic community for a generational contest with Beijing.

But Trump simultaneously pursues a hemispheric-empire logic - a modern Monroe Doctrine that treats the Western Hemisphere as America's exclusive zone while telling Eurasian allies they are on their own. If this tendency prevails and Washington retreats behind hemispheric walls, the result is not order but a scramble: multiple great and middle powers carving out their own regional domains.

The third tendency is the most dangerous. Trump's territorial demands on allied nations, his hostility to international law, and his interference in European politics on behalf of illiberal populists hint at a superpower that has not lost interest in the world but turned predatory within it. Brands warns that smaller powers, especially along Eurasia's fault lines, could find themselves squeezed on several sides at once.

Brands argues that the coming U.S. electoral cycles will determine which tendency hardens into irreversible pattern. Trump is "no rigid hemisphericist" - he pushes the Monroe Doctrine while chasing peace deals on distant continents and waging wars in the Middle East. But each contradictory move forecloses options and reshapes the global landscape in ways that may prove impossible to reverse. Perhaps his successor will moderate the disruption - or perhaps the neoisolationist wing of the MAGA movement will triumph, and a superpower hunkers down in its hemisphere.

Previously: Zeihan explained why Trump is the most consequential president in a century.