By Bob Rae

November 28, 2025

Analysts are always searching for “turning points”, “tipping points”, and “inflection points”.

For me, February 2025 was such a moment. It was the month when the world we thought we understood was turned on its head.

As the third anniversary of the illegal Russian invasion of Ukraine approached, Ukraine was determined to have another General Assembly debate and a resolution. Then, the American delegation did something we had never seen before.

The US advised the Ukrainians and others (including Canada) to withdraw the resolution scheduled for debate on Monday the 24th, and to vote in favour of wording that called for “peace” without security or assurances about territorial integrity, and without language that described the Russian intervention as an act of aggression.

The American strategy, which was clearly shared with the Russians, failed to carry the day in the General Assembly, but succeeded in getting 10 votes in the Security Council after an intense weekend of pressure on the elected Council members.

In the UNGA vote at the beginning of that week, the US voted with 17 other countries, including North Korea, Iran, Belarus, and Russia, against Ukraine and all its other allies, marking the end of one era and the beginning of another. We had entered a different universe.

Then, on February 28th, an American president humiliated a democratic ally on live television in the Oval Office on behalf of a warmongering autocrat.

The events that we are reeling from this week — with the United States now making it clear that it will only make an effort to secure Ukraine’s survival if it accepts a patently unacceptable peace agreement — were telegraphed then. And this poses an unprecedented challenge to Ukraine, Canada, NATO, Europe, and the wider world.

We have moved from President Trumps’s isolationist rhetoric to a much more serious breach in the postwar alliance as the United States changes its relationship with both Russia and China, replacing longstanding democratic allies with autocracies hostile to the rules-based world order America has led for more than 70 years.

Despite all the bumbling and nonsensical back-and-forth since it was disclosed, the US-backed plan has revealed for all to see that Ukraine cannot count on the support of an unrecognizable America.

No one else’s views will matter. It’s as if Orwell’s Oceania, Eurasia, and Eastasia — three states of which historian Mark Connelly says, “The beliefs may differ, but their purpose is the same, to justify and maintain the unquestioned leadership of a totalitarian elite” — have come to life.

But 1984 was supposed to be a warning, not a playbook.

The Trump administration is using tariffs to speed a new status quo defined by an economic zero-sum game in which tariffs are used as a cudgel and coercion tool. This shift from values-based relationships to transactional ones is huge.

While that system of rewarding capitulation and punishing defiance is creating a network of economic subjugation ludicrously based on the apparent whims of Donald Trump, the old network of positive U.S. influence — the soft-power juggernaut of American international development aid, humanitarian assistance and international law — has been all-but obliterated.

The Witkoff-Dmitriev deal is part of that cynical, anti-democracy universe. Despite all the bumbling and nonsensical back-and-forth since it was disclosed, the US-backed plan has revealed for all to see that Ukraine cannot count on the support of an unrecognizable America, and that the interests of the proposal’s principles and backers in both the Kremlin and the White House are more closely aligned than anything imaginable since 1945.

The consequences of all this are far more serious than the “business as usual” mindset that prevails in all institutional frames — few are yet prepared to admit the extent of the change, of the betrayals, and their deep consequences. Silence is still the dominant response because intimidation breeds it.

But people have to consider the deeper consequences.

On June 29, 1937, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King wrote a long note in his diary about his discussions with both Chief of the Luftwaffe High Command Hermann Göring and Chancellor Adolf Hitler. I mention this in the context of Steve Witkoff’s assessment of Vladimir Putin as a “good man” with the best interests of the Russian people in mind.

As he shook Hitler’s hand after receiving a signed photo in a silver frame, Mr. King writes that he told Hitler he appreciated “the constructive side of his work, and what he was seeking to do for the greater good of those in humble walks of life, that I was strongly in accord with it, and thought it would work.” He then went on: “My sizing up of the man as I sat and talked with him was that he is really one who truly loves his fellowmen”.

There were deadly consequences to this and so many other disastrous assessments of Hitler’s policies and plans. But at least there was never an accusation that Mackenzie King was in Hitler’s pocket.

Political vision, deep competence, and courage are all needed to get us out of this morass. Where it will come from is not as obvious as it was the last time dictators joined forces to imperil humanity.

Bob Rae was Canada’s ambassador to the United Nations from 2020 until 2025.