The temptation is strong to hope that the storm has passed. To believe that a week that began with a US threat to seize a European territory, whether by force or extortion, has ended with the promise of negotiation and therefore a return to normality. But that is a dangerous delusion. There can be no return to normality. The world we thought we knew has gone. The only question now is what takes its place – a question that will affect us all, that is full of danger and that, perhaps unexpectedly, also carries a whisper of hope.
Forget that Donald Trump eventually backed down from his threats to conquer Greenland, re-holstering the economic gun he had put to the head of all those countries who stood in his way, the UK among them. The fact that he made the threat at all confirmed what should have been obvious since he returned to office a year ago: that, under him, the US has become an unreliable ally, if not an actual foe of its one-time friends.
That much was spelled out in ways both gross and insulting. In the second category comes his latest remark that Nato allies were “a little off the frontlines” in Afghanistan, a despicable affront to the families of the 457 British service personnel and their comrades from across the alliance who gave their lives in that conflict.
In the first category was the unveiling of his latest venture: having earlier told the Norwegian prime minister, who he falsely accused of denying him a Nobel medal, that he was becoming bored of peace, he came to Davos to launch his “board of peace”. Trump is the one book you can judge by its cover, and so the new body’s logo said it all: as one wit observed, it was basically the UN badge “except dipped in gold and edited so the world only includes America”.
That captured the essential points: that the “board of peace” is an attempt to supplant and monetise the post-1945 international architecture, replacing the UN with a Mar-a-Lago-style members’ club where a permanent seat costs $1bn and decision-making power lies in the hands of Trump himself, even after his presidential term expires. That Vladimir Putin has been invited, and Mark Carney shut out, tells you all you need to know.
For a while, the US’s allies comforted themselves with the belief that Trump was an aberration who would one day be gone, allowing the old ways to resume. That delusion has also been shattered. When Trump still seemed determined to make good on his Greenland threats, there was no sign of anyone or anything inside the US that would stop him. Over these last 12 months, Trump has demonstrated that the formal restraints designed to hold a US president in check are easily swept away. And if it can happen once, it can happen again. Which means it is not just Trump who is an unreliable ally. Sadly, it is the US itself.
There are some immediate lessons to learn from all this. The first is that Trump keeps going unless and until he meets resistance. His former adviser Steve Bannon told the Atlantic this week that Team Trump’s strategy in all areas is “maximalist”, to go as far as they can until someone stops them. Trump’s Greenland moves prompted a stock market plunge and domestic disapproval – 86% of Americans opposed an armed conquest of the island – but it also brought a united front and serious economic counter-threats from Europe. Europeans stood up and Trump backed down.
That points to a more enduring and essential lesson for longtime friends of the US. They cannot be in a position of such dependency on the US – whether economic or military – that they have to give in to its demands. For explaining that simple point so starkly, Carney was rewarded with a standing ovation in Davos following a speech that may come to stand as the defining text of this period. “The old order is not coming back,” the Canadian prime minister said. “We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”
What Carney called for, and what the moment demands, is a new arrangement, a new formation. The “middle powers”, the nations of the democratic west outside the US, do not have passively to accept that the old world of “institutions and rules” has been replaced by a new world of “strongmen and deals”, as the former head of MI6 phrases it. Instead of competing with each other to be the most accommodating of the US hegemon, flattering the Oval Office emperor in the hope of being spared his wrath, they can, says Carney, “combine to create a third path”.
What would that look like? The obvious shape is a new constellation of the European Union plus the UK plus Canada, both an economic bloc with heft and a security alliance with muscle. Ultimately, it would aim to provide a positive answer to the question that has loomed this last year especially: could Europe defend Ukraine, and itself, without the US? At present, the cold, hard answer to that question is no. Volodymyr Zelenskyy was not wrong to say that today’s Europe “remains a beautiful but fragmented kaleidoscope of small and middle powers,” one that “looks lost, trying to convince the US president to change [when] he will not change”.
So the goal is nothing less than a new alliance of western democracies no longer dependent on the US for their own defence. It cannot happen overnight; it might take a decade or more to achieve. But, as the former foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt told me this week, it would be “a major dereliction of duty if we don’t do the work now” to reach that goal.
Because it will take time, it means there can be no sudden breaks from the US. As long as allies remain reliant on US protection, the likes of Keir Starmer will have to keep smiling as he shakes Trump’s hand. The Nato vehicle will have to stay on the road, even as its most powerful member keeps slashing the tyres. But all the while, a newly conceived grouping, perhaps presented innocuously as a mere “European arm of Nato”, will be consolidating and gaining strength.
The unavoidable key to this plan is vastly increased defence spending. That will remould the politics of all those countries who have enjoyed a peace dividend since the end of the cold war, one that freed them to spend less on guns and more on schools and hospitals. And it will reshape the decades-old debate over Britain’s relationship with Europe. Both parties will surely have to move, as Britain ditches its Brexit delusions and the EU grants Britain something closer to frictionless trade in return for the serious contribution the UK will be making to Europe’s defence.
There are opportunities here, including for Starmer. He can present manifesto-breaking tax rises as a matter of national security. He can present closer ties to Europe the same way. He can leave Nigel Farage marooned on the wrong side of public opinion, fanboy to the man who insulted Britain’s war dead. Starmer can cast Reform as the party in thrall to Trump, and Reform’s opponents as the true defenders of Britain’s sovereignty and independence.
The world we knew is dying, slain by the would-be emperor on the Potomac. But something else became visible this week: a new world waiting to be born.
Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist
