According to an emerging conventional wisdom, U.S. President Donald Trump is seeking to work with autocratic great powers to carve up the world into “spheres of influence.” For example, Anne Applebaum writes, “That vision, of a world divided into three spheres of influence, run by three great powers … influences some in the Trump administration.” A headline in Time magazine warns of “Trump and the Dangers of Spheres of Influence.”

Even social media influencers seem drawn to this idea, with a widely circulating  online map showing the world divided into three, with equal parts going to Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

According to an emerging conventional wisdom, U.S. President Donald Trump is seeking to work with autocratic great powers to carve up the world into “spheres of influence.” For example, Anne Applebaum writes, “That vision, of a world divided into three spheres of influence, run by three great powers … influences some in the Trump administration.” A headline in Time magazine warns of “Trump and the Dangers of Spheres of Influence.”

Even social media influencers seem drawn to this idea, with a widely circulating  online map showing the world divided into three, with equal parts going to Trump, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But is this the right way to think about Trump’s foreign policy?

To be sure, Trump wants an American sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere. But he is also fiercely competitive, and he is unwilling to grant similar dominions to Putin and Xi. In this way, he is more like traditional American presidents, advancing American security close to home while also working to prevent adversaries from dominating important geopolitical regions.

As Stephen Walt correctly argues, a sphere of influence can be understood in both a positivist and normative sense. It is a fact of life that major powers tend to have outsized influence on smaller neighboring countries. Recognizing, and not interfering in, other powers’ spheres of influence has sometimes been seen as a way of mitigating rivalry and conflict in an anarchic international system. Washington and Moscow, for example, essentially granted each other spheres of influence in Europe in the post-World War II peace negotiations and throughout the Cold War.

Since the end of the Cold War, however, the term has taken on a more negative connotation. In a liberal international system, small states should be able to choose their own domestic political and economic systems, foreign policies, and alliance networks without undue influence from domineering neighbors. Granting Russia or China a sphere of influence over Eastern Europe or East Asia, for example, would essentially mean consigning the people of, say, Lithuania or Taiwan to subjugation by a hostile autocratic power.

When analysts accuse Trump of pursuing an international system based on spheres of influence, therefore, they generally levy it more as a criticism than as a neutral analytical observation.

But is Trump really bringing about a global order based on spheres of influence? A fair look at the evidence shows that he is not.

To be sure, Trump wants an American sphere of influence in the Western Hemisphere. His “Donroe Doctrine” explicitly calls for the United States to restore “dominance” in the region. The rhetoric is backed by action. He has followed through by working to eject Chinese companies from operating ports in the Panama Canal, removing President Nicolás Maduro from power in Venezuela, and threatening the Communist regime in Cuba.

In fact, it is well understood that Trump wants to dominate the Americas, so the real question is, does Trump want to grant Russia or China a sphere of influence in Eurasia?

If Trump wanted to grant Putin a sphere of influence, the path would be simple. He could pull the United States out of NATO, cease arms supplies to Ukraine, and negotiate a settlement to the war in Ukraine that grants Putin de facto control over Kyiv and much of the rest of Russia’s near-abroad.

But he is not doing that. Instead, he has strengthened NATO by encouraging allies to greatly increase their defense spending to 5 percent of GDP, provided weapons to Ukraine (paid for by Europe) and approved their use inside Russian territory, and ramped up economic pressure by sanctioning Russian energy giants.

If this is part of a plan for granting Putin a sphere of influence in his near-abroad, it is sure a strange way of going about it.

Rather, this pattern of behavior is more consistent with a plan to contain Putin and, as the National Security Strategy clearly spells out, to prevent hostile powers from dominating important regions.

We see a similar pattern in East Asia. A true plan to grant Xi a sphere of influence in East Asia would start by stopping arms shipments to Taiwan, changing America’s “one China” policy to downgrade relations with Taiwan, ending or weakening America’s alliance commitments with regional allies, and tasking the Pentagon with forgetting about defense planning for the Indo-Pacific.

But, once again, we see the exact opposite. Trump’s National Defense Strategy identifies America’s second priority (after defending the homeland) as deterring conflict in the Indo-Pacific. That is a euphemism for the military containment of China. The administration has passed the largest U.S. defense budget in history focused on building military capabilities tailor-made for war with China. Trump has also approved the largest Taiwan arms package in history. Contrary to fears that the Trump administration would weaken its language related to Taiwan’s independence, it did the opposite. The State Department dropped language saying that it opposed Taiwan’s independence. Citing Europe as an example, the Trump administration is asking Asian allies to spend more on defense. My colleagues at the State Department report that one of their top priorities is deterring China by negotiating enhanced basing, access, and overflight rights with regional partners.

If this is Trump’s plan for granting China a sphere of influence in Asia, Xi must be perplexed and displeased.

Examining other world regions reveals a similar pattern. Iran has long vied to become the most dominant state in the Middle East, but far from granting Tehran a sphere of influence, Trump has bombed its nuclear program and amassed an armada for a possible second round of strikes that could end with the collapse of the regime.

Trump might not be as hard-line on Xi and Putin as some would like. He does not seem interested in seeking justice for Putin’s war crimes. He would like a big trade deal with China. And so on. That is fair enough, but none of this is evidence that he wants to grant hostile dictators a regional sphere of influence.

A final accusation is that Trump’s desire to dominate the Western Hemisphere will give a permission slip to Xi and Putin to do the same in their regions, but this argument does not stand up to scrutiny. Xi and Putin are not looking for an excuse to invade their neighbors. Putin has already done so, and Xi claims that Taiwan is already part of China. Precedents matter in domestic court proceedings, but not in international security; Washington and Brussels may have an oversupply of lawyers and an undersupply of historians.

In sum, Trump is not an international relations theorist pondering how best to remake the global order. He is a man of action pursuing America’s self-interest. That pursuit is leading to a policy seeking to contain hostile great powers by ejecting them from the Western Hemisphere and preventing them from dominating their own regions. These have both been central pillars of American grand strategy for decades. The logic of America’s power and security situation is leading the Trump 2.0 administration down a well-worn and reliable path.