Vladimir Putin has proposed a summit with Donald Trump and Xi Jinping in China next month, Steve Bloomfield reported in an October 24 commentary in The Guardian. Bloomfield, the former international editor of the Observer, treated the proposal conditionally: if the meeting occurred, he wrote, the three leaders could push the world toward spheres of influence held by the United States, China and Russia. He said one summit would not turn that idea into reality, but would send the world down a dangerous path.

Bloomfield framed the proposal as a test of the power that remains in the final two years of a presidency. He wrote that Congress can be lost during that period, approval ratings can sink like a stone, a president’s party can begin considering a successor and the occupant of the Oval Office can feel power draining away. Domestic legislation grinds to a halt when bipartisan cooperation is nearly nonexistent, he wrote, but presidents retain power over foreign policy as they approach the end of their terms and begin considering their legacies.

In 10 days, Bloomfield said, Trump would enter his own “twilight zone.” He said Trump was almost certain to lose control of the House and could face a Democratic Senate, leaving little prospect for passing domestic policy. Bloomfield also said Trump had shown limited attention to domestic policy during the first two years of his second term and would instead face investigations that could again lead to impeachment.

On the world stage, Bloomfield said, the story would be different. He contrasted Trump’s ambitions with those of George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, writing that Trump’s “ambitions won’t be peaceful.” Bloomfield called the first two years of Trump’s second term “catastrophic” and said the final two could be even worse.

Once the midterms were over, Bloomfield wrote, the United States was understood to be planning to restart what he called its “unwinnable war” with Iran. The United States was already conducting exercises with the Israeli military and withdrawing diplomats from the region. He also wrote that Trump’s “sellout of Ukraine” was well under way. Trump had argued during the previous week that “Russia, frankly, has been fine on Ukraine,” while Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff met Vladimir Putin in Moscow and praised him in a televised meeting as a “humanitarian…and I salute that, I commend you and I thank you again.”

Bloomfield placed the proposed summit on top of what he called a “reckless war” in the Middle East and “appeasement” in Europe. He argued that the shadow of a new world order was emerging and that Trump would relentlessly pursue it during his final years. If the unprecedented meeting took place, Bloomfield warned, it could have “potentially devastating consequences” for the rest of the world.

The three leaders’ ambitions included changing how the world was governed, in Bloomfield’s assessment, essentially dividing it into spheres of influence. In Europe, he said, the summit could have consequences beyond Ukraine if the United States refused to help protect nations threatened by Russia. In East Asia, he said, withdrawal of the American security blanket would cause enormous problems for Taiwan, South Korea, Japan and Australia. Bloomfield connected the proposed gathering to growing fears about “the end of the west,” saying this was a moment when those fears could crystallize.

Bloomfield’s case rested in part on the administration’s previous-year National Security Strategy. He wrote that the ambition to divide the world into spheres and “side with dictators over democrats” had long been evident. The 33-page strategy was deeply critical of traditional U.S. allies in Europe and East Asia, but Bloomfield said its omissions were most striking because Russia and China avoided direct criticism.

The strategy did not mention China once in six paragraphs describing the threat to Taiwan, Bloomfield noted. Elsewhere, the document praised China as “rich and powerful … us[ing] its wealth and power to its considerable advantage.” Its section on Russia’s war in Ukraine failed to explain how the war began and did not call for Putin’s defeat. Instead, Bloomfield said, it focused on how the United States could help Europe and Russia mend their relationship.

The document also discussed the importance of U.S. control of the Western Hemisphere. Bloomfield wrote that it made clear that so long as the United States retained economic dominance, it cared little whether other parts of the world were protected. The document’s wording, quoted by Bloomfield, was: “The affairs of other countries,” it stated, “are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.” He wrote that the strategy argued that, for too long, America’s allies had “suck[ed] us into conflicts and controversies central to their interests but peripheral or irrelevant to our own.”

For Putin, Bloomfield said, the change represented a success almost three decades in the making. He wrote that Putin had long viewed American support for democracy in eastern Europe and central Asia as “interference” in Russia’s backyard and that Trump now agreed with that position. Bloomfield also wrote that Trump had placed Putin on a much higher pedestal than Russia’s economy and technological capabilities deserved.

Xi also had reason to welcome a U.S. rhetorical retreat from East Asia, Bloomfield argued, particularly if it allowed China greater maritime control in the East China Sea and South China Sea. He wrote that international opinion of China had improved dramatically while opinion of the United States had declined. Chrystia Freeland, a former Canadian foreign minister, put it more directly: “there has not been a president who has been more beneficial for China than Donald Trump.”

At stake was more than territorial control, Bloomfield wrote. All three governments saw a possibility of increasing economic ties. For the United States and China, the larger issues were future control of economic supply chains and technology platforms, while Russia’s fossil-fuel resources also factored into the calculation. Bloomfield described all three as key players in the next space race, both commercially and militarily.

If the three governments began working together at the expense of Europe and the rest of the world, Bloomfield said, the nature of geopolitics would change fundamentally. A decade earlier, discussion of a multipolar world had centered on the United States, China and the European Union as the three leading blocs. In his assessment, Brussels had been replaced by Moscow.

International institutions nevertheless continued to function. Bloomfield wrote that the rest of the West had, on the whole, tried to muddle through. NATO still existed on paper, and G7 and G20 summits continued to take place even if they were chaotic. Optimists in the Foreign Office pointed to Trump’s appearance at the UN General Assembly and the administration’s continued involvement in the UN’s day-to-day activities.

Mark Carney spoke of a “rupture” and warned that the old post-Cold War world was not coming back, Bloomfield wrote. Despite warm words from Emmanuel Macron and renewed discussion about how Europe could protect itself without the United States, he said, there remained a sense that governments were waiting for Trump’s time in office to end. A Great Powers summit would make the changing order harder to ignore, he concluded.

As historical context, Bloomfield wrote that presidents rarely found foreign-policy success in their final months, even though they generally sought it. In the final weeks of his presidency in 1992, George H.W. Bush sent 28,000 American troops to Somalia to help end a famine. Bush argued that the intervention eased the famine, but Bloomfield wrote that it ended in humiliation after a botched raid on a warlord killed 18 U.S. soldiers and several hundred Somalis.

Bloomfield described Clinton’s Middle East initiative as a quixotic attempt to bring peace by ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He also noted that Clinton’s Camp David talks collapsed after Ehud Barak and Yasser Arafat could not reach an agreement. Obama restored diplomatic ties with Cuba, made a historic visit to Havana and made a final, successful push on the Iran nuclear deal. Bloomfield said Obama’s diplomacy in Cuba and Iran succeeded before Trump “promptly ripped up” both policies.

As possible alternative outcomes, Bloomfield wrote that Trump might receive his photoshoot, “and maybe that’s all he wants,” but there was no guarantee that the proposed grouping would become a permanent geopolitical fixture. He said Trump’s foreign policy had divided the MAGA movement and shocked traditional conservatives. The Wall Street Journal editorial board described the proposed summit as “arguably the worst idea of the second Trump term.”

Bloomfield speculated that a President Vance or Rubio might be less willing to “throw in their lot with dictators,” while “a President Ossoff or Ocasio-Cortez certainly won’t.” His larger warning was that the United States could lose even if Trump did not win. Trump would arrive in Shenzhen at what Bloomfield called the weakest point of his presidency: an 80-year-old lame duck unable to pass legislation and threatened by two chaotic years of investigations into his alleged corruption.

Opposite Trump, Bloomfield portrayed Putin and Xi as authoritarian leaders in their early 70s who believed the only thing preventing them from ruling their nations for another two decades was death. He noted their “hot mic” discussions about longevity drugs the previous year and suggested they might believe they could rule for even longer.

If the summit proceeded, Bloomfield said it would bring Putin back into international prominence and reinforce Xi’s position as a global leader who could not be ignored. The image of the three leaders, he wrote, could define an era in which the rules-based international order had been torn apart and a new, uncertain period began to form.