By Jeremy Kinsman

January 13, 2026

For 80 years, the main anchor and principal architect of the “rules-based” cooperative order has been the United States. Now, in a reversal begun in Donald Trump’s first term and accelerated in his second, the US is abandoning that role. This is not just episodic isolationism. This is aggressive unilateralism, directed also toward America’s closest allies.

Former Secretary of State John Kerry sees President Trump “taking the country back to the pre-First World War era, putting us in a position that has isolated us from our normal allies.”

CNN GPS host Fareed Zakaria considers such alliances a huge American advantage over both Russia and China, who intimidate their respective regions. But French President Emmanuel Macron, alarmed by U.S. unilateralism, judges that now “we are living in a world of great powers with a real temptation to divide up the world.”

As to the notion of an Orwellian retreat into “spheres of influence,” the U.S. risks being mostly home alone, poking its nose into South and Central America until quagmires take their usual toll in blood, treasure and standing.

Russia isn’t the great power that Putin dreams of in his swoon over an imaginary “Russian World” that would out-muscle Europe. The EU’s GDP is the same as China’s, each is nine times greater than Russia’s, which is slightly lower than Italy’s. Russia will drift farther into China’s orbit. The Global South will weigh more, not less, as the West fragments, and must be engaged. But for now, the international rules-based order is being pounded by its own self-immolating superpower, the United States.

As senior White House official Steven Miller said of President Trump’s worldview to CNN’s Jake Tapper: “You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live in … the real world, that is governed by… strength …force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world that have existed since the beginning of time.”

The U.S. and allied architects of the postwar rules-based order intended to cast such jungle notions of great power impunity to history’s dust bin, partly vindicating the horrible costs of World War Two.

But when New York Times journalists asked President Trump if he respects any checks on his power, he replied, “I don’t need international law. I’m restrained only by my own morality.”

The military decapitation of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, widely regarded as bad actor on a world stage increasingly populated by them, primarily targeted the securing and extraction of Venezuelan oil reserves. U.S. intervention in Central and South America to displace governments, usually leftist, that did not defer to perceived U.S. interests, is well known to the region. But President Trump’s declaration that this coup was to “establish and make clear” U.S. “domination of the Western Hemisphere” is a chilling message beyond the Americas.

The express U.S. intention to take over Greenland is a grievous threat to transatlantic relations and to international principles of sovereignty. Trump has said repeatedly that the U.S. “must have it,” “the easy way or the hard way” to obtain U.S. “ownership” he describes as “psychologically needed for success.”

Never mind that all land in Greenland is publicly owned common property (residents own their houses, but not the land). Never mind that 85% of Greenlanders do not want to be part of the U.S.

Just as Russia is escalating threats against Europe, the sudden threat of a U.S. imperialistic land grab of Greenland would only encourage Putin’s cruel and lawless drive to ‘have’ Ukraine.

Both the prime minister of Denmark and premier of Greenland emphasize firmly that Greenland is not for sale, reminding the Trump that U.S. security objectives are eminently achievable in cooperation with Denmark, and within the NATO alliance. But Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warns that if the U.S. were to try to “get” Greenland the “hard way,” it “would be the end of everything. It would shatter NATO by eviscerating its core commitment to mutual defence under Article 5.

Just as Russia is escalating threats against Europe, the sudden threat of a U.S. imperialistic land grab of Greenland would only encourage Putin’s cruel and lawless drive to “have” Ukraine.

But Trump, who has disparaged NATO since his first term, now asserts that “Russia and China have zero fear of NATO without the United States,” implying that, having failed to pull the U.S. out of NATO, he is now aiming to fracture the Alliance by having it pull away from the U.S.

His disdain for the EU, which he says was “created to screw America”, supplements his encouragement — including via the shocking National Security Strategy published in early December —  of populist right-wing anti-EU political parties seeking to displace allied governments.

In the Sunday Telegraph, Philip Cunliffe of University College, London described the dilemma this poses to NATO partners: “An alliance in which the strongest preys on the territory of the smallest is not an alliance, but a racket. A racket is a shakedown by gangsters claiming to ‘protect you from the very threat that they have themselves created’.”

Prof. Cunliffe calls for a “new alliance system, grouping together closest neighbours and peer-level powers, such as France and Germany.” And, one should add, Canada.

The postwar U.S. aim to “translate raw strength into rules, and legitimacy” needed allies. Now, the somewhat abandoned allies need a powerful re-boot of imagination to sustain and eventually reinforce the cooperative institutions and ideals behind the U.S.-led rules-based order, but without the U.S.

Are the Europeans up to overcoming preoccupation with internal politics to unite around the need to reinforce the principles of cooperation that define them, and make these clear to the U.S.?

International institutions are facing an existential crisis of means and purpose. NATO, a slow-moving over-staffed essentially American organization, is in anguish. The World Trade Organization idles along in helpless anomie. The critical climate institutions have to shift from offense against global warming to defence of principles that the world had already agreed to, but that the Trump administration considers “a hoax.”

Organizations devoted to human welfare, such as the World Health Organization, and humanitarian agencies such as the World Food Program, are strangled by depletion of US funding. David Miliband, head of the International Rescue Committee, calculates there are 230 million people who depend on such organizations to survive.

Of course, Danish, Canadian, and other leaders can’t write the U.S. out of their national-interest scripts. The Danes and Greenlanders meet this week with Secretary of State Rubio. Canada and Mexico aim to renegotiate CUSMA, and to stabilize our respective essential bilateral relationships with the U.S.

The Europeans and the Brits who have kowtowed to Trump in the hope of reducing the pain of tariffs, need also to coax from the U.S. security support for Ukraine, and willingness to exert pressure on Russia to come to fair terms.

But soul-searching is going on, over the contours and meaning of the changed world we have before us. Leaders and foreign policy thinkers are recognizing that transatlantic democracies need to reinforce their commitment to international rules-based cooperation, without the U.S. if necessary.

Prime Minister Carney knows that Canada has to put in the hard work to survive, diversify, and thrive in these new configurations, with the U.S., with the world, and with our internationalist convictions, and with an urgency we hadn’t expected.

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.