A European-wide chorus of resistance, led this morning by Keir Starmer, has greeted Donald Trump’s plan to take over Greenland, by force if necessary, and to start a tariff war if any country stands in his way. Have no doubt, this is a moment: if pursued as a non-negotiable demand, Trump’s plan ends any lingering hope that the liberal rules-based order can stumble on through his remaining time in office. The real question now is whether the 2020s will be defined by the complete collapse of the order’s already crumbling pillars and the atrocities accompanying it, or whether an international coalition of the willing can come together to build a new global framework in its place.
For, in quick succession, the US has abandoned its longstanding championing of the rule of law, human rights, democracy and the territorial integrity of nation states. Gone is its erstwhile support for humanitarian aid and environmental stewardship. Gone, too, is the founding principle of the postwar settlement: that countries choose diplomacy and multilateral cooperation over aggression and unilateral action. We cannot doubt any longer that the president meant it when he said he doesn’t “need international law”, and that the only constraint on his exercise of power would be “my own morality, my own mind”.
Indeed, in the past few weeks, every single promise of the US-led Atlantic charter, authored by Franklin D Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, which foreshadowed the United Nations charter and which includes “freedom of the high seas”, free trade and freedom from colonial aggrandisement, has seemingly been cast aside. For Trump, as his political adviser Stephen Miller tells us, the world is to be “governed by strength … by force ... [and] by power”.
But if Greenland marks the end of the world looking to the US for leadership, it has also become the moment for Europe and the democracies of the global south to lift their heads out of the sand. They, and other democracies, should now set out a new statement of values and rules that show how we will champion peace, stability and justice, and deliver meaningful progress in areas where international cooperation is essential. As Keir Starmer has argued, reaffirmed by the attorney general at the 80th anniversary celebration of the United Nations in London on Saturday, this now means reinvigorating, for a new age and new challenges, the enduring shared values on which the post‑1945 institutions were founded.
So how to proceed? The democracies of the world should draft a short values statement, echoing the UN charter’s starting point – “We the peoples …” – and this time showing we mean it. Its first section would assert our full support for self-determination and the mutual recognition of nation states; for the outlawing of war and coercion; and for the primacy of law, civil rights and democratic accountability as the essential means by which human dignity is advanced. A second section would outline the rules that govern the cooperation essential to guarantee food, water and security, economic opportunity and social justice, and climate resilience and health for all, including pandemic prevention.
Such a charter should make it clear that no one need apply for the vacant leadership of the global order for, in our new multipolar world, power has to be shared among countries, each with vastly different traditions, ethnicities and ideologies. But neither can the new world acquiesce in what the US, Russia and China now threaten: a return to the 19th-century arena of spheres of influence and great-power domination.
Instead, we have to ask how we can advance multilateral cooperation in a multipolar world, and so a charter has to take fully into account what has fundamentally changed long before the Trump presidency, and what was never considered seriously in the constitutions of 1945: the existential nature of the climate crisis; the rightful demands for gender equality; the modern threat of terrorism and the role of other non-state actors, including those with vast concentrations of accumulated wealth and technological power. Also the previously neglected but now rising aspirations of the global south; and perhaps most of all, the need to reach across borders to reflect our increased and inescapable interdependence.
For one thing seems clear: the truth is that an “America first”, us-versus-them, nationalist politics that despises international cooperation does not have the support of the global public. In fact, they are ahead of leaders in understanding that the sheer extent of our dependence on each other gives us no other option but to work together. And whether it be the stranglehold China has through its monopoly of rare earths, or the maritime choke points that can close down the Strait of Hormuz and other trade corridors, we know that to prevent interdependence being weaponised in hostile ways, the rest of us must act together.
We have arrived at a moment of truth for Europe. For too long, its voice has been silent as the Trump administration has violated internationally agreed trade rules; savagely slashed international development aid; and threatened Canadian, Panamanian and Mexican neighbours. This month, Trump’s US is walking out of 66 international organisations, most of which the US itself had created, while at the same time making the momentous decision to constitute an alternative, a “board of peace”, with a remit for interventions far beyond Gaza, and with membership offered to about 60 favoured states, including Russia.
But no global initiative can hope to command wide support or be seen as legitimate if it is merely elites agreeing how to balance their power. And any new charter has to make the connection between meeting local needs and aspirations and the global cooperation that can bring this about. We need to reaffirm for a new generation the need for equality of opportunity and fairness of outcomes, and for what Roosevelt called the four freedoms – of speech and worship, from want and from fear.
Years from now the history books will tell us that Trump could have declared a quick victory in negotiations over Greenland – accepting the Danish offer of virtually unlimited military bases and access to Greenland’s 25 critical minerals. But, to quote the Danish foreign minister after his Washington talks: “It’s clear that the president has this wish of conquering over Greenland.” With that Trump has truly signalled the end of the era when people in every continent saw the US as “a shining city on the hill”.
That does not mean the US cannot lead again. In his 1961 inaugural address, President John F Kennedy said we must build “a new world of law where the strong are just and the weak are secure and the peace preserved”. That is a path the US, and the world, must walk again.
Gordon Brown is the UN’s special envoy for global education and was UK prime minister from 2007 to 2010
