The Three Way World

By Dhag Prasad Poudel

WASHINGTON — Oct. 21, 2026

A U.S. deal to buy diesel from Russia, sweeping sanctions waivers for Moscow’s oil trade, and a scramble by Washington, Beijing and Moscow to lock down Africa’s mineral wealth are fueling growing speculation among diplomats and analysts that the post-Cold War order is giving way to a world carved into three competing spheres of influence.

The shift is playing out in real time through a string of reversals that have strained alliances on both sides of the Atlantic. The same U.S. administration that hit India with steep tariffs for buying Russian crude is now buying Russian energy directly — a contradiction that has drawn condemnation from Kyiv, European capitals and members of Congress from both parties.

The Oil Reversal

The about-face has been swift and, to critics, jarring.

In August 2025, the Trump administration imposed an additional 25% tariff on Indian goods, pushing the total rate to 50%, specifically because New Delhi kept purchasing discounted Russian crude — oil that made up roughly 30% of India’s imports that year. The argument was framed as a matter of principle: buying Russian oil meant financing Russian aggression. By February 2026, after India committed to phasing out those purchases, Washington cut the tariff back down to 18%, months before the administration’s own energy reversal with Moscow.

Yet in October 2026, that principle collapsed under its own weight. President Trump signed off on a deal for the United States itself to purchase diesel from Russia, explicitly to help ease global fuel prices. Days later, he moved to suspend sweeping new sanctions on Russian oil and gas — sanctions that had just taken force under the Lindsey O. Graham Sanctioning Russia and Iran Act of 2026, which Trump signed into law on September 18 and which authorizes tariffs of up to 500% on Russian-origin goods and up to 100% on imports from the five countries that buy the most Russian crude or gas (a group that includes China and India). Trump’s executive order paused those tariffs for 60 days to “assess economic impacts,” just as they were set to bite. The U.S. Treasury also extended a sanctions waiver allowing Russian oil giant Lukoil to keep operating service stations abroad until April 2027.

The deal suspends fuel export sanctions on Russia for six months, letting Moscow sell diesel at market prices — a real boost for a Russian economy that analysts say is creaking under war strain. Trump has defended it as necessary to keep Vladimir Putin at the table for peace talks with Ukraine and to ease pump prices for American voters ahead of November’s midterms, even demanding that Ukraine halt its attacks on Russian oil refineries as part of the arrangement.

The reaction was immediate and bitter. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said the move “plays into Russia’s hands.” EU foreign ministers called it “concerning” and insisted their own sanctions would continue regardless. A bipartisan group of U.S. senators wrote a letter calling the deal “a betrayal of the people of Ukraine” and “a gift to our adversary.” European officials, including the EU’s top diplomat Kaja Kallas, have pushed Trump to impose more sanctions rather than strike deals that fund the war machine he claims to be constraining.

The optics were impossible to miss: the same government that penalized India for buying Russian oil was now buying it directly — and asking its own ally, Ukraine, to stand down its strikes on Russian energy infrastructure in return.

A Decade-Old Prediction Resurfaces

The irony has not been lost on observers tracing the arc back a decade. In the final 2016 presidential debate, Hillary Clinton warned that Donald Trump would become a “puppet” for Vladimir Putin, willing to “spout the Putin line” and unravel NATO. Trump shot back, “You’re the puppet.”

Ten years on, with the U.S. easing sanctions and striking energy deals with Moscow even as war continues in Ukraine, that exchange has resurfaced across political commentary — not as a settled verdict, but as a question hanging over the current moment: which prediction aged better?

Three Spheres Taking Shape

Step back from the headlines and a broader pattern emerges — one that looks less like a series of isolated deals and more like the early architecture of a new global order, organized around three centers of gravity:

China is consolidating its hold over Asia, deepening economic ties through Belt and Road infrastructure investment and positioning itself as the region’s unavoidable gravitational center.

Russia, battered by sanctions but unwilling to retreat, is leaning into a reconsolidated sphere across Europe’s eastern periphery and the old Soviet space — though NATO’s continued pull on Western Europe makes a clean Russian sphere over the whole continent a far harder sell than China’s position in Asia.

The United States, meanwhile, appears to be refocusing inward on the Americas — North and South — echoing an old Monroe Doctrine instinct of dominance closer to home, even as it strikes transactional deals with rivals abroad when convenient.

Underneath this realignment sits a quieter, more fundamental shift: the erosion of the multilateral institutions that were supposed to prevent exactly this kind of great-power carve-up. Critics have long pointed out that the UN Security Council is already effectively paralyzed, since any of its permanent members can veto action that threatens their own interests. If Washington, Moscow, and Beijing increasingly find it more useful to deal with each other directly than to work through bodies like the UN or NATO, those institutions may not need to be formally dissolved — they could simply be hollowed out, left standing in name only while real decisions happen elsewhere.

NATO itself is already showing real strain. At the 2026 Ankara summit, Trump pushed European allies to honor last year’s pledge to raise defense spending to 5% of GDP by 2035, framing years of reliance on U.S. support as “ridiculous.” Europe has genuinely increased spending in response, but tensions have run well beyond budget lines: Trump ordered the withdrawal of 5,000 U.S. troops from Germany after German Chancellor Friedrich Merz criticized the U.S. war on Iran, and some American policy voices are now openly arguing Washington should stop bargaining with Europe altogether and begin a full military drawdown from the continent. A NATO that exists mainly on paper, with the U.S. steadily disengaging from Europe’s defense, would fit neatly into the three-sphere picture taking shape elsewhere.

Parallel to this, the financial architecture underpinning American global power is facing its own slow challenge. The BRICS bloc — Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, and newer members — has been building alternative payment infrastructure through BRICS Pay, designed to link national systems like Russia’s SPFS, China’s CIPS, and India’s UPI so trade can settle without passing through the dollar or SWIFT. By some estimates, this has already cut dollar usage within BRICS trade by roughly two-thirds, and multiple non-aligned nations have started settling oil and grain trades directly in yuan, rupees, and rubles. A single BRICS currency remains, by the bloc’s own admission, a distant prospect — the dollar’s deep liquidity and capital markets aren’t easily replaced — but the infrastructure for a parallel financial system is no longer theoretical. It is being built, transaction by transaction.

Africa: The Contested Middle Ground

If there is one region testing the limits of a clean three-way division, it’s Africa. No single power can yet claim it outright, but the contest for influence is intensifying fast, and the numbers now back that up.

China’s Belt and Road investment in Africa surged 254% year-on-year in the first half of 2026 alone, reaching $33.5 billion — about two-thirds of all Belt and Road money going anywhere in the world, led by projects in Ethiopia and Egypt. China also still controls roughly 72% of cobalt output from the Democratic Republic of Congo, the heart of the global battery supply chain.

Russia, meanwhile, has rebuilt its old Wagner Group into a state-controlled “Africa Corps,” with its largest deployments concentrated in Mali, Libya, and the Central African Republic, trading security assistance and regime protection for mining concessions and political loyalty — though Wagner’s pullback from Mali shows that footing is less stable than it looks, with local resentment building over mounting atrocities.

The United States has shifted from talk to action too: Washington signed a critical minerals agreement with the Democratic Republic of Congo this year directly challenging China’s grip on cobalt and copper, followed by a similar minerals memorandum with Nigeria in September 2026 covering exploration through refining. U.S. officials have been explicit that the goal is to stop “cheap commodity flooding” from China into Western markets.

Africa itself holds about 30% of the world’s critical mineral reserves but captures less than 5% of the value created from them — which is precisely why all three powers are circling. A formal partition of the continent along great-power lines remains unlikely. What’s already real is a grinding three-way competition to lock down the mines, ports, and governments that control where those minerals end up.

The Outlook

Whether this tri-polar framework fully materializes is still genuinely an open question, and the countries that don’t fit neatly into any of the three spheres are the biggest wildcard of all. India is a case in point: it has balanced Russian oil purchases, Western trade pressure, and leadership ambitions within BRICS all at once, and this year found itself effectively squeezed into settling some Russian trade in yuan — a small but telling sign of how quickly middle powers can get pulled into someone else’s orbit even while trying to stay independent. The Middle East, similarly, answers to no single pole: Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the UAE are now financing their own critical minerals plays in Africa, competing with all three major powers rather than aligning with any of them.

What is clear is that the assumptions underpinning the post-Cold War order are being tested in real time, deal by deal and waiver by waiver. NATO’s cohesion, the dollar’s reach, the UN’s relevance, and the rules once thought to govern how great powers treat smaller ones are all being renegotiated simultaneously, with no single event marking the transition. Past 2030, the shape of what replaces that order will likely come down to a handful of concrete tests already in motion: whether Europe can fund its own defense fast enough to matter if the U.S. keeps withdrawing, whether BRICS Pay and its parallel settlement systems reach a scale that meaningfully dents the dollar, and whether African governments can convert the current scramble for their minerals into real leverage rather than simply trading one set of outside patrons for three.