The End of the World Order as We Know It – Nice of You to Notice

For the past week the global commentariat has been behaving like someone who suddenly realises, halfway through his morning espresso, that his house burned down sometime last Tuesday and everyone else has been politely stepping around the ashes ever since.

Donald Trump announces, quite openly, that the United States wants to take Greenland, one way or another. Washington sharpens the tariff knife. NATO’s obituary is proclaimed yet again. The United States, we are solemnly informed, can no longer be trusted as an ally and that it is even a predatory state. The West is finished.

Cue panic. Cue Davos. Cue the anguished cries of people who have not had to think seriously about power since the mid-1980s.

All of this reached something of crescendo last week when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, speaking with unusual frankness, acknowledged that the so-called liberal rules-based order was over. “Let me be direct,” he stated. “We are in the midst of a rupture not a transition.”

Quite. And where, exactly one might ask, have you been for all these years?

Rupture? You Don’t Say

Leaving aside other elements of Carney’s speech that went on about how “middle powers” might club together to rehabilitate an international order already abandoned by the world’s actual major powers (we might believe that when Canadian defence spending hits 6% of GDP), Carney’s remarks were hailed as a moment of bracing honesty, in particular his acknowledgement that the “rules based order” was always a “comfortable fiction” and “partially false”. It was no use lamenting its passing, he added, as the “old order is not coming back”.

Here was a senior Western figure daring to speak the truth. And compared with the usual Davos clichés about “stakeholder capitalism”, “inclusive growth” and “public-private partnerships” (repeat until dinner), it was refreshingly blunt.

But the real question is not whether Carney is right about the passing of the “rules based international order”. He plainly is. The question is why it has taken so long for people like him to notice. The answer lies in a comforting illusion: that American power had, post-1945, somehow transformed itself from self-interest into benign liberal principle.

As anyone who possesses a degree of familiarity with the history of American foreign policy will tell you, the United States has always acted in its own interest. It has always treated international law as conditional. It has always exempted itself from rules it helped design when those rules became inconvenient. This is not a criticism. And, most significantly, this is not a Trumpian innovation. It is how great powers behave. It is how the US has behaved for decades since the end of World War II, as numerous studies have made clear. The American imperium has always been an axis of hypocrisy rather than an axis of democracy.

What has changed is not American conduct, but the moment at which Western self-deception has finally been forced into daylight.

Trump Didn’t Break the System, He Stopped Pretending

For much of the Davoisie and the rest of the internationally mobile seminar class, Donald Trump’s unforgivable sin is that he refuses to perform the rituals that sustain its illusions – something else that Carney, to give him his due, perceptively noted.

When Trump talked about taking Greenland, he was not indulging a deranged cartographic hobby (for reasons of geopolitics, the US has been after Greenland for over a century). He was doing what he has always done: opening with an outrageous premise designed to reset the bargaining space, remind allies of their dependencies and signal that certain sacred cows are no longer a protected species. It was leverage, performed loudly.

Trump was, of course, denounced as an imperial throwback. Yet the substance of his approach is disarmingly clear and has been for years. At Davos – and everywhere else – Trump shows little interest in multilateral theatre, legalistic incantations or moralised process. Problems, in his view, are to be resolved through leverage, pressure, inducement, threats and deals. Outcomes will be judged by results, not by the sincerity of the nodding during plenary sessions.

Trump’s Art of the Deal diplomacy was fully on display during his first term and should at least have forearmed critics of his approach to foreign affairs. The Abraham Accords achieved in a few years what decades of peace-process piety could not. North Korea’s live missile firings over the Sea of Japan all but ceased when Kim Jong-un was confronted with the possibility that Trump might actually mean what he said, when he referenced that his nuclear button “is a much bigger and more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” ISIS was crushed through unapologetic force. Iranian influence across the Middle East was checked through selective demonstrations of military prowess.

This is classic updated gunboat diplomacy. We academics call this coercive bargaining. In Trump’s hands it is undeniably crude but effective. The discomfort it provokes says less about its logic than about a political and foreign policy caste unaccustomed to power being exercised without procedural camouflage. And it is here that Britain’s political class invites a far less flattering comparison. While Trump uses bombast as leverage, Britain has perfected a far stranger art: the deal that delivers no discernible benefit at all.

One could list any number of recent demonstrations of British foreign-policy ineptitude – failure to control the country’s borders being the most elementary. But that tendency is concentrated, almost to the point of parody, in the Chagos arrangement.

Handing the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, a state with no legal or historical claim and a close partner of China, only to pay handsomely to lease them back, and to do so over the explicit wishes of the Chagossians themselves, is not diplomacy so much as ritual self-humiliation. It is foreign policy stripped of any comprehensibility: ideological decolonisation performed at significant financial and strategic cost.

Trump’s deal-making may offend polite sensibilities, but it has the virtue of being intelligible. The Chagos arrangement (at the time of writing possibly in the process of being scrapped under American pressure), by contrast, encapsulates the geopolitical illiteracy of Britain’s governing elite. It is hard to know even what one should call it: a negative-sum deal, a reverse auction of the national interest?

The point is: one approach recognises how power works and uses it to secure outcomes. The other advertises weakness, elevates legalistic abstractions over strategic judgement, invites ridicule and signals to allies and adversaries alike that Britain can be pressured, managed and exploited. Guess who is ultimately likely to be more respected on the world stage?

Europe: Where Strategy Goes to Retire

If Britain’s strategic awareness appears to have gone on an extended leave of absence, the condition of Europe more broadly is scarcely healthier. The Chagos imbroglio is not an aberration so much as a symptom: a particularly egregious illustration of a habit of mistaking moral posture for strategy and dependency for agency. This was the larger point Trump drove home at Davos, albeit without any diplomatic cushioning: that Europe has come to consider security as a standing entitlement rather than a responsibility and has organised its politics accordingly.

That posture is largely the product of a specific historical moment. After the Cold War, with the disappearance of the communist threat on its doorstep, European states found themselves enjoying unprecedented security without having to think too hard about how it was produced or who was paying for it. American power underwrote the settlement. European integration supplied a form of bureaucratic insulation. Strategy, in the classical sense, however, was quietly pensioned off.

In its place emerged a distinctive European style of diplomacy – part insufferable doctoral candidate, part genteel retiree. In its tiresome postgraduate mode, Europe lectures the world on ethics and global responsibility while quietly outsourcing the burdens that make such moral confidence possible. In its other elderly retirement-home guise, it settles into complacency and comfort, assuming that security is a permanent endowment rather than something that must be maintained, defended and occasionally renewed. European defence, in effect, has been placed in assisted living: nominally independent, but reliant on others for anything that requires real exertion.

Defence spending has come to be seen as an unfortunate overhead rather than the price of sovereignty. Norms and values expanded to occupy the space once held by hard military capability. Process took precedence over preparation. Defence budgets withered even as declarations about Europe’s global role grew ever more ambitious.

Trump’s offence, in this context, was that he articulated what has long been tacit and obvious to anyone who cares to look: external protection is not a birthright, dependence is not dignity and sovereignty without power is largely theatrical. The resulting outrage owed less to violated principle than damaged amour propre, akin to the irritation of a client reminded, somewhat tersely, that insurance policies expire when the premiums go unpaid.

In sum, European elites were unsettled not by the logic of the argument, which had underpinned American strategy for decades, but by the sudden removal of diplomatic varnish. The verbal upholstery fell away, and with it the consolations of plausible denial.

Europe is now learning, belatedly, that sovereignty cannot be subcontracted without consequence.

Power, Rediscovered (Again)

What further unsettles the Davos set is the implication carried by Trump’s record as much as his tone. His approach to foreign policy – transactional, coercive and unapologetic – has produced outcomes that, while rarely elegant, are undeniably concrete. For a political and academic class that spent three decades declaring such methods obsolete, this record is deeply disconcerting, and often embarrassingly so.

It suggests that Trump’s diplomacy succeeds not by accident, but because much of what displaced power politics after the Cold War amounted to aspiration dressed up as strategy. Summits multiplied. Processes thickened. Normative language flourished. Yet when confronted by actors willing to employ force and coercion, the West repeatedly found itself strategically weightless.

The war in Ukraine is a case in point. For all the rhetoric of deterrence, Western posture prior to Russia’s invasion demonstrably failed to prevent it. Since then, support for Ukraine has been extensive but curiously unanchored: it remains unclear by what theory of victory assistance is calibrated, how escalation is to be managed, for how long the commitment is sustainable, or what political end-state Western governments are seeking. The result has been an effort that is morally emphatic but strategically opaque, revealing a broader incapacity to translate values into coherent strategy.

Once more, none of this should come as a shock. Power never disappeared from international politics; it was simply moralised, proceduralised and politely ignored (at least by the Europeans and their academic and policymaking fellow travellers). Material interests were recast as ethical commitments and questions of strategy were displaced by a complacent managerialism. The world did not become post-power; European elites simply persuaded themselves that it had.

Trump did not invent this contradiction. He merely refused to disguise it.

Warnings Given, Warnings Ignored

It is worth recalling, too, that this outcome was not unforeseen. Over the past two decades, figures from across the political and strategic spectrum warned that the West was losing geopolitical sentience: the capacity to understand how power functions in the world.

As far back as 2014-15, figures like Charles Powell, Margaret Thatcher’s foreign policy advisor, lamented the “false doctrine of soft power” and “creeping legalism” that made it hard for “democratic societies to meet new threats”. Former Chief of the Defence Staff, Sir David Richards, argued that the West needed to recover a strategic sensibility. And even the Economist felt the need to remind European policy makers that the “false hope” invested in multilateral dialogue and diplomatic proceduralism was a poor substitute for hard power. At the time, these warnings emanated not just from inconsequential contrarians (like myself) but voices deeply embedded within the system.

But they were ignored because they were inconvenient. They disrupted a comfortable consensus that preferred process to power, the pieties of international law to leverage and moral confidence to strategic competence. Listening to them would have required rearmament, prioritisation and political risk. It was altogether easier to convene another panel on climate change.

The End of History as Administrative Fantasy

At the heart of this long detour lay a powerful but fragile belief: that liberalism had both triumphed and rendered serious geopolitical rivalry out-of-date. With the Soviet Union out of the picture, conflict was assumed to have been transformed into a form of techno-managerialism that would steer the world towards its inevitable termination at “the end of history”. What remained was administration: markets, elections, institutions and a gradual convergence toward liberal norms.

Francis Fukuyama became the emblem of this moment, though the view he articulated was far more widely shared across the Western cognoscenti. A generation of policymakers, academics and commentators internalised the assumption that power had been tamed, that coercion was an anachronism, that borders were irrelevant and that dissent from this view reflected either backwardness or moral deficiency.

Meanwhile, as the siren voices had long cautioned, the rest of the world was unlikely to cooperate. China industrialised at scale, consolidated state power and learned how to exploit Western economic, technological and institutional openness without reciprocating it. Russia rebuilt coercive capacity and tested Western resolve repeatedly, discovering that indignation was rarely matched by consequence. Both learned, with some precision, how Western idealism could be used against itself.

The liberal order survived, in other words, only so long as people indulged its illusions.

Collapse Was Not Sudden – Only Acknowledged Late

There was no single moment at which the rules-based order collapsed. It eroded instead through a succession of increasingly difficult-to-ignore demonstrations that rules were applied selectively, enforced when convenient and ignored when interests dictated otherwise.

The Iraq War exposed the conditional status of international law. The financial crisis of 2008 revealed how quickly transnational solidarity evaporates under strain. Western action to facilitate the overthrow of the Gaddafi regime in Libya in 2011 showed how easily humanitarian language could be detached from responsibility. Afghanistan demonstrated how rapidly an entire state-building project could disintegrate once belief was exhausted. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 reminded Europe that war had never left the continent – it had merely been talked out of mind.

Each episode weakened the façade. None was decisive in isolation. Together they rendered denial progressively untenable.

As Ernest Hemingway observed of bankruptcy, collapse happens gradually and then suddenly. The ‘suddenly’ does not mark the moment of failure, but the moment of recognition – when observers finally concede that what they are witnessing has been underway for years. For many, that concession appears to have arrived at Davos last week.

After the Illusion: On Accountability and Its Absence

Recognising error on this scale would require something that contemporary Western politics is poorly equipped to deliver, namely, accountability. Not performative regret. Not carefully worded lessons-learned exercises. But a reckoning with the strategic, political and human costs of prolonged self-deception.

Such a reckoning is, of course, unlikely. Institutions rarely indict themselves. Careers endure by reframing failure as complexity, misjudgement as misfortune and collapse as unforeseeable. Those who warned where this was heading will not be invited back to explain how they were right. History will move on.

What we are left with, however, is the incontrovertible fact that power has reasserted itself as the organising principle of international life. Of course, it never truly left. What has disappeared is the illusion that it could be ignored indefinitely without consequence.

For those who bought into this illusion, the moment will feel abrupt, unsettling and unfair. In truth, it is merely the price of having mistaken indulgence for judgement.

Michael Rainsborough is Professor of Strategic Theory and Director of the Centre for Future Defence and National Security, Canberra.