Imagine that you were You and Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping woke up a year ago having been magically given command of the puppets that control the White House. Your explicit geopolitical goal is to undermine confidence in the United States on the world stage. You want to destroy the rules-based Western order that has preserved peace and security for 80 years, and which allowed the United States to triumph as an economic superpower and beacon of hope and innovation for the world. What exactly would you do differently with your puppet, other than implementing the ever more reckless agenda that Donald Trump has he continued since he became president last year?
Nothing.
In fact, the split-screen juxtaposition of three events this week: Trump’s nearly two-hour commemoration of his first anniversary as president; the gathering of rebellious and shaken global elites in the snow of Davos; and the spectacle of Denmark and its European allies build a military force in Greenland for the express purpose of deterring a US military takeover – could one day be seen as heralding the official end of the great experiment in a rules-based international order that has been in surveillance since World War II.
In the first three weeks of 2026, Trump’s Mad King ravings about Greenland have accelerated into something far more stunning and alarming: a superpower choosing to self-immolate and torch its remaining global trust and friendships, including and especially NATO, the most powerful geopolitical alliance in world history, at precisely the moment when it had been reinvigorated and renewed and at its strongest and most important level ever recorded following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Trump’s interest in Greenland is as inexplicable and personal as a presidential side quest has ever been. Seeking Danish control over a territory with a population of just 57,000 and land largely covered in mile-thick ice is not a long-standing conservative narrative; it is not a subject that has been discussed for a long time in international relations courses or even in the most marginal far-right media; it is not a territorial acquisition that Wall Street has been demanding and coveting for decades; there is no well-funded lobbying campaign to “Build Greenland Green” by shadowy business interests working the halls of the Capitol, and there is no rebel movement for indigenous freedom and independence in Greenland whispering at cocktail parties in Washington desperate for American aid; and even, as is the case for much of America’s Manifest Destiny era, it is not territory that large numbers of American settlers are desperate to settle. None of that, quite the contrary.
In fact, given the United States’ sheer strength on the world stage and its network of alliances like NATO, anyone in the United States who had desires regarding Greenland could already put them into practice. United States Already there is a military base – and, in fact, there used to be many more military bases there and chose to reduce them over the years. Sure, it might contain valuable rare earths and its routes to the melting Arctic might facilitate trade in the future, but even all of that would have been accessible to any of the countries. dreaming plutocrats who hoped to gain access to its riches given that Denmark was, until a few hours ago, one of our nation’s closest and most trusted allies. Almost everyone who has wanted to settle in Greenland has already done so.
The annexation of Greenland is as unpopular with Americans as almost everything that has ever been questioned– only 17% of Americans support Trump’s initiative, and 4% think it is a good idea for the United States to take Greenland by military force. To put this in context: according to a 2022 survey, about 13 percent of Americans believe in Bigfoot.
Nor is Donald Trump’s new imperial ambition arriving at a tumultuous peak of popular and political support. His approval rating has fell regularly since his return to power. He is spectacularly underwater in support of his signature immigration efforts. The news headlines are filled with how it seemed, for a while, to be incredibly close friends with the world’s most famous pedophile. Democrats win and win seats and offices by spectacular vote percentages. And the Republican majority in the House rests on such a narrow margin now that Speaker Mike Johnson’s control of the House rests on the vagaries of things like car accidents in Indiana. Nor has Trump rallied the nation to a great patriotic cause; in fact, he can barely express the vision he is pursuing: on Wednesday in Davos, he repeatedly referred to “Iceland” when he meant “Greenland.” A few hours later, he announcement he would have arrived at the “framework for a future agreement” with the NATO Secretary General regarding Greenland and the Arctic, but even if such an agreement emerges in the future, the damage is done and the path of the world’s future has been rewritten.
Occupying and annexing Greenland is Trump’s mind at work in the strangest and most unbalanced ways. He admitted it in a disturbing and disjointed way Interview with the New York Times at the beginning of the month. To the question “Why Greenland?” » he said, “Because that’s what I think is psychologically necessary to be successful.” It is Donald Trump who fully embraces as president the worldview he expressed most succinctly in his speech. infamous Access Hollywood adhesive tape: “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” And indeed, nothing he experienced over the course of a decade on the world stage disavowed him of this belief, as he repeatedly beat and outsmarted the system and became the first convicted felon elected to the White House.
To watch the lobby for Greenland is experiencing one of the craziest things any country or head of state has done in all of modern world history, dating back to the very creation of the nation-state era in 1648 with the Treaty of Westphalia. It is actually difficult to find a geopolitical parallel. Countries and leaders have certainly made choices and mistakes that ended in ruin – there’s Napoleon deciding to invade Russia or the actions of the Austro-Hungarian Empire at the start of World War I – but it’s impossible to imagine a single moment when a country so carefully committed itself to consciously dismantling its primary sources of national strength and influence.
For the 80 Years after the end of World War II, the American model of innovation, commerce, and economic hegemony was built on the foundation of six seemingly inviolable traditions and policies maintained in Republican and Democratic administrations: (1) unparalleled ready access for immigrants to the United States, particularly to its world-class schools and universities; (2) rich and consistent government support for higher education, medical research, and laboratories; (3) broad and ever smoother commercial access to American markets and, reciprocally, a flow of American products to the rest of the world; (4) a firm, unyielding, and unquestionable adherence to the rule of law in the country that has made the United States a predictable and safe place to create, build, and do business domestically; and (5) an equally firm, unyielding, and unquestionable network of overseas geopolitical alliances that wove a security blanket that spanned the entire globe, backed by the most powerful and far-reaching military ever seen in human history.
These five pillars helped strengthen and support another, equally essential pillar: (6) a politically independent and fiscally prudent monetary policy that made the U.S. dollar the safest reserve currency in the world. This has made US Treasury bonds the savings bank of the entire world – for democracies and authoritarian regimes alike! – and has made America’s banking networks and capital markets the ideal place for any company seeking access to investors.
Presidents have surely tinkered with the margins of this recipe – cutting here, investing there – and sometimes even fundamentally altering it, as Richard Nixon did when he took the United States off the gold standard in 1971 and rewrote the era of the Bretton Woods economic model created in the aftermath of World War II. But even then, Nixon understood how the pillars reinforced each other and pointed the way toward a future still calmly and steadily led by the United States. And, yes, surely due to a combination of missteps, from disastrous imperialist adventures in Iraq to the financial collapse of 2008 to a misjudgment of the rise of China, American power had already retreated from the moral position and unipolarity it held at 8:46 a.m. on Tuesday, September 11, 2001. But a quarter of a century after that summit, day after day, the United States still served as the point anchor and foundation for peace, power and world peace. establishments. (It’s also worth noting that after the 9/11 attacks, NATO rallied to America’s side, invoking its “Article 5” protections for the first and only time in its history, and Denmark was such a loyal partner that the small Nordic country experienced the third highest number of deaths per capita fighting alongside the United States in Afghanistan and Iraq.)
It is impossible to overestimate the gift of security, wealth, opportunity, and pure innovation that these six fundamental pillars of American policy have brought both to the outside world and to Americans at home. To be clear, America’s eight-decade reign at the top of the world order has not been without significant human costs – felt most acutely by those on the far reaches of the Cold War, from Vietnam and Cambodia to Africa and Latin America. But scratch away almost any of humanity’s titanic achievements over the past 80 years of human history and you will see traces of America’s six foundational policies, from astonishing achievements in human health and well-being to the decline of global poverty to the very invention of the Internet. Pick almost any measure of business success and I can show you how this six-part recipe applies. To pick just one: the four global companies valued at $4 trillion (Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft and Apple) have seen immigrants or their children play a key role in their success.
And yet, over the last year – in ways that Putin or Xi could not have imagined we would do again selves – Donald Trump has systematically undermined the six pillars. In recent weeks in particular, it has caused lasting and irreparable damage to the rule of law, global alliances, and the independence of U.S. monetary policy.
In the first three weeks of this year alone, we saw estimates that legal immigration to the United States would decline as much as half; warnings that doctoral programs are facing collapse after the administration’s year-long assault on science, higher education, and research; Europe and its closest trading partners are preparing billions new prices on American trade; masked federal law enforcement, with all the hallmarks of a fascist secret police, occupy a major American city as the president launches surveys of local and state political leaders who oppose him; and the chairman of the Federal Reserve fiercely launched a dire warning on presidential pressure on the country’s monetary policy.
But it is in international friendships that we most clearly see costs rising in real time. Just look at the statements coming from that mountainous redoubt of global capitalism in Davos: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, the leader of our closest ally and largest trading partner, whose military is now the modeling fighting the United States across what has long been the world’s longest unguarded border – got a standing ovation for a speech in which he proclaimed: “Let us be clear: we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” Or take the example of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who essentially called for independence of the United States.
It’s the end of the world as we’ve known it for 80 years – all for reasons that will confound future political scientists and historians. There is no strategy behind this superpower suicide exercise. other than the president’s narcissism, his greed and his general frustration never to be respected by the elites whose favor he desires more than anything.
On one level, Trump’s January rampage highlights the collective failure of all the institutions, safeguards, checks and balances that the United States thought it had in place to constrain executive power gone berserk. But chief among these institutional breakdowns is the sheer cowardice of this narrow Republican Congress, which betrayed the fundamental belief and trust of its founders that the Legislative Branch would protect its own powers and authorities from the Executive Branch and act first to uphold their oath of office to the Constitution and not as members of a President’s own party.
Putin and Xi must be amazed at their good fortune; in Davos, China is already presenting itself to Europe and the world beyond to help pick up the pieces of the American century. Putin, who has seen the blood and treasure of a generation dispersed in the Ukrainian mud, is getting a reprieve when he least deserves it. He spent his own quarter-century in power claiming that the “democratic West” is just as corrupt as his own authoritarianism – and now, day after day, Donald Trump is providing him with plenty of new evidence.
For much of his first presidential term, conspiracy theorists wondered and tweeted that Trump must be a Russian agent; In this second term, we have come to an even more horrific conclusion, even more embarrassing for the American voter and more damning for Trump in the final judgment of history: He is doing all of this of his own free will.
Historian Barbara Tuchman once noted the grand funeral of Edward VII of England in May 1910 – a fabulously colorful mourning parade that brought together nine kings, seven queens and 40 other imperial and royal highnesses – as the culmination and last gasp of that great era of wealth and geopolitical domination that had been 19th century Europe, before it destroyed itself in the First World War and cedes control of the world to this new America on the other side of the Atlantic.
In the same way, one day we will tell our children about January 2026 in world politics, and they will not be able to understand what we have done to ourselves. Nor will they ever be able to envision what the United States once meant to the world beyond.
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