By Jeremy Kinsman

November 25, 2025

Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand this week lauded G20 Summit declarations on climate change and debt, celebrating a “great day for multilateralism.”

Why multilateralism?

The success of the multilateral system, in which nations cooperate and concert to find common solutions to world problems, had been staggering. But as Isabel Allende once wrote about husbands, “there is always room for improvement.”

When an increasingly unilateralist — some would say isolationist — Donald Trump walks away from that system, determined to impose globally his own definition of American interests, there is something very wrong.

Mark Carney welcomed participation in the Summit of 42 national leaders including the core G20 and invited guests, observing, “that’s multilateralism.” President of Brazil Lula da Silva, ventured, “I think multilateralism will win.”

Indeed, as the Trump-led peace process involving Ukraine and Russia takes on typically chaotic, cynical proportions, the latest pushback from multilateralism is unfolding with the new “Coalition of the Willing” of 33 democracies, including Canada, formulating its response.

The US had pulled out of the G20 Summit after Trump, in typically outrageous fashion, wildly accused the South African government of “slaughtering” white farmers. He has offered US asylum to white Afrikaners, having curtailed U.S. asylum for anybody else to a trickle.

The U.S. also defected from the almost simultaneous COP 30 conference in Brazil because President Trump has asserted, notably before the UN General Assembly in September, that global warming is a “hoax.” Without a US envoy like John Kerry to press oil-rich exporters to commit to reduce carbon emissions, the consensus-dependent conference declaration failed to mention fossil fuels at all.

Under Trump, such retreats from multilateral conferences and UN institutions the U.S. had not only long supported but founded and led — including the World Health Organization (WHO) and, especially pertinent in view of Trump’s weaponization of tariffs, the World Trade Organization (WTO) — are accompanied by disdain for international law altogether.

The U.S. actively seeks to de-legitimize the International Criminal Court, sanctioning its justices. Lydia Polgreen of the New York Times writes, “Trump has abandoned even a fig leaf of fealty to principle,” citing political scientist Pratap Bhanu Mehta: “It’s one thing to say: There’s some rules of international law that don’t apply to us…It’s another thing to say: I really don’t care what international law is.”

Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host now starring as Trump’s “Secretary of War” has staged vigilante assaults in international waters on boats bound from Venezuela, reflecting Trump’s his penchant for abuse of U.S. power, imposing steep costs on any country that protests or annoys him, including punishing unilateral tariffs aimed at shredding the remaining authority of the WTO.

The man who has lied tens of thousands of times in office and misrepresents, misdirects and misinforms multiple times a day threatens loony lawsuits that make a mockery of the term “double standard”, most recently one for $5B against the BBC for a misleading video splice in a report on the January 6, 2021 insurrection.

But on the immediate and transcendent geopolitical issue, a one-sided 28-point plan to end the war in Ukraine, he may finally have gone too far, in his assumption of uniquely entitled prerogative.

The proposed plan would have rewarded Putin’s forceful seizure of Ukrainian territory by a one-way “swap” of land in the Donbas of Ukrainian land Russia hasn’t even taken militarily, possibly because Trump is sympathetic to Putin’s sacrifice of as much as a million wounded and dead in his murderous assault on Ukraine.

The war in Ukraine must indeed stop. But Putin has persuaded Trump that if it isn’t on Russian terms, he will obliterate Ukraine.

Most wars cease combat when both sides are exhausted. Once Ukraine had heroically resisted Russia’s initial massive invasion, the war became a grinding stalemate in which Russia has managed to gain only 1% more of Ukraine territory.

Trump should now be pressing Russia to accept an immediate ceasefire along present lines. The array of issues, including final territorial outcomes, could be settled over time or not, but with credible security guarantees for Ukraine.

Instead, the US-authored plan amounted to a surrender by Ukraine to Russia. Trump announced Ukraine needed to accept it or try to modify it by US Thanksgiving Thursday, or face inevitable destruction. Trump credits Russia as the bigger, more powerful country, the only measure of superiority that he seems to consider decisive.

Most wars cease combat when both sides are exhausted. Once Ukraine had heroically resisted Russia’s initial massive invasion, the war became a grinding stalemate in which Russia has managed to gain only 1% more of Ukraine territory.

The plan nowhere acknowledged that Russia has done anything wrong. A grotesque re-packaging of Russia’s original objectives, it should have been unimaginable for it to be taken seriously by any western government, much less the US.

Whose plan was it? U.S. Secretary of State Rubio, connecting to a bipartisan gaggle of US senators attending the Halifax Security Conference, assured them it was a Russian draft the US “negotiator” Witkoff had agreed to pass on. But following swift correction from Trump spokespeople, Rubio acknowledged instead that the US had “authored” the plan.

In any case, Ukraine was not consulted as Witkoff consorted in the concoction of a shameful draft in secret talks in Miami with Russian envoys. Nor did the US consult European democracies, who shoulder the task of financing and policing the safekeeping of a postwar Ukraine.

Zelensky had to find something in the original proposals he could go along with or be vilified by Trump as “being against peace,” prompting Trump to walk away from Ukraine altogether. It should have been obviously unthinkable for Ukraine’s allies to accept the negotiated defeat of the first European democracy since WW2 by an outside invader.

Until now, most world leaders have in various degrees of self-abasement publicly deferred to Trump’s rapacious ego and thoughtless bullying, fearful that public defiance would unleash more punitive tariffs or other temperamental reprisals.

But on the sidelines of the G20 summit, 11 key G20 countries — including Germany, France, the UK, the EU, Japan, and Canada — publicly pushed back against Trump’s 28-point plan.

The 11 signers of the Leaders’ Statement on Ukraine took pains to congratulate Trump, noting the plan “includes important elements that will be essential for a just and lasting peace.” They, too, want to keep the US on board as a security guarantor for Europe as well as for Ukraine.

It is a huge dilemma for Zelensky. Without US back-up, assistance, and pressure on Putin, Russia will win. But if he signed on, Ukrainians would take to the streets in protest, even in their state of exhaustion from the war.

European publics depict their leaders as weak in appeasing Trump and hope they will straighten their spines and defend their principles.

In the end, it’s usually the people who make history.

For the first time, Trump seems to have lost his touch and monopoly of power. His public support is drifting downward to unprecedented levels for a president at this stage of a term. His erratic behaviour and flip-flops, abusive language, fanciful boasting about the economy, and disregard for norms and institutions, no longer rally a people already anxious over his fantastical management of the economy. White House grift is not just in the air, as his family’s brazen self-dealing enrichment is increasingly obvious. A lame-duck watch has begun.

Americans hate being conned. Worse, they hate appeasers. Tom Friedman calls Trump’s apparent course on Ukraine his “Chamberlain moment.”

Continuing negotiations with Zelensky and principal Europeans have now seriously modified the US Ukraine peace plan, and Trump naturally claims the unspecified changes as “good news”.

Maybe Trump will correctly read America’s changing mood, and the derisory assessment of his peace plan at home and abroad, turn his presidential ship around, and pressure Russia

More broadly, distraught internationalist US ex-allies have to concert to salvage as much of the rules and principle-based global system as possible. President Ramaphosa of South Africa evinced the hope that America’s isolation from the G20 and international cooperation might encourage other nations now to connect more productively with each other.

If so, Minister Anand correctly saw the G20 declarations and pushback over the shameful 28-point peace plan as a global re-set in that commitment, indeed a “good day”, at a bad time, for multilateralism.

Policy Contributing Writer Jeremy Kinsman served as Canada’s ambassador to Russia, high commissioner to the UK, ambassador to Italy and ambassador to the European Union. He also served as minister at the Canadian embassy in Washington. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.