In the world being ushered in by Trump, power will prevail over cooperation. We will come to rue having taken this path
The Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, inspired a wave of enthusiastic nodding among the cosmopolitan crowd gathered in Davos last month when he took to the podium and proclaimed that the world order underwritten by the United States, which prevailed in the west throughout the postwar era, was over.
The organizing principle that emerged from the ashes of the second world war, that interdependence would promote world peace by knitting nations’ interests together in a drive for common security and prosperity, no longer works. The US blew it up.
Donald Trump came to believe that every other country treated the US as a chump, free riding on its security guarantee and abusing its open market – no matter that the United States set most of the rules underpinning the postwar architecture, and broke them when it suited its interests, or that the rules enabled an era of remarkable American prosperity.
In an act of bravery not often experienced among the jet setters in the Swiss Alps, the Canadian prime minister challenged every other country to accept the loss of American leadership and build an alternative global architecture that might bypass the great powers intent on bending everybody else to their will.
