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The newest conventional wisdom among the commentariat is to lament the passing of our “rules-based international order”—especially in the aftermath of  Donald Trump’s plundering raid through Davos, Switzerland, when the U.S. president nearly upended NATO in pursuit of what he called a “piece of ice,” or Greenland.

But there’s a larger lesson to be found in the extraordinary spectacle of the usually fractious Europeans standing united against the man whom many now see as the mad king of Washington—and in the sudden revolt of global markets against Trump’s behavior. The markets have since stabilized, but “Sell America” sentiment persists, an ever-present threat hovering over Trump’s “A ” economy.

The newest conventional wisdom among the commentariat is to lament the passing of our “rules-based international order”—especially in the aftermath of  Donald Trump’s plundering raid through Davos, Switzerland, when the U.S. president nearly upended NATO in pursuit of what he called a “piece of ice,” or Greenland.

But there’s a larger lesson to be found in the extraordinary spectacle of the usually fractious Europeans standing united against the man whom many now see as the mad king of Washington—and in the sudden revolt of global markets against Trump’s behavior. The markets have since stabilized, but “Sell America” sentiment persists, an ever-present threat hovering over Trump’s “A ” economy.

The lesson is that an awful lot of people—not just the Europeans but also the international economic system and all its key players, even arguably many leading Chinese—don’t want to see the breakdown of this system and are absolutely terrified of what could ensue.

Why? Anyone marginally acquainted with human history knows what such an outcome would likely mean: the decimation of international trade, a reversion to impoverishment through anarchy and isolation, and an unstable balance of power marked by the ever-present threat of war. And the risks would be vastly greater in the 21st century in a hair-trigger environment of high-tech (possibly nuclear) war and the unleashing of global threats, from cyberattacks to climate change to unrestrained artificial intelligence to future pandemics—all without any international cooperation to govern them.

It’s fair to say that few people want to risk a descent into that potential abyss, except possibly for Trump and his minions, such as Stephen Miller, the senior White House aide who dismisses international norms as “niceties”; Russian President Vladimir Putin and his fellow neoimperialists in the Kremlin; some factions of Chinese hard-liners, and an assortment of third-world autocrats scattered in their already-isolated palaces around the globe.

Even Europe’s far-right parties, once seen as reliable Trump acolytes, are lining up against him over his attempted grab of Greenland. And there is good reason for that.

In Europe, more than most regions, the legacy of a world where might alone makes right—the only true Trump doctrine, if one does exist—is still too vivid a memory, just eight decades old. These leaders have their issues with the European Union—but in recent years, to improve their viability at the polls, they’ve had to move away from planning to exit the EU to saying they will “reform” it from within. As Mattias Karlsson, the former leader of the right-wing, nationalist Sweden Democrats, put it on X: “Trump increasingly resembles a reverse King Midas. Everything he touches turns to shit.”

In other words, though Trump and his team are working hard to destroy the rules-based international order, it may prove stronger than they—or anyone else—realizes.

Protesters carry a banner during a demonstration by unemployed people in Berlin circa 1930. Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Unfortunately, pundits have tended to defend and describe this postwar global system in the abstract—or in broad strokes—without specifying where and when it actually made a difference between war and peace; prosperity versus depression; and perhaps even, in one instance, between survival versus apocalypse.

There are plenty of concrete examples over the past 80 years since the end of World War II. Here’s just one. Compare the outcome of two major stock market crashes: one that occurred before the........

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