On Tuesday afternoon in Davos, Mark Carney issued one of the most important speeches of our era.

It shouldn’t be this way, of course. A speech by the Prime Minister of Canada at the World Economic Forum should not be of epochal relevance. But we live in times of chaos. We live in a period where the old system is dying and the new one has not yet been born. And here, finally, was a man who could articulate a hopeful and realistic vision of the future.

All around him, there was anarchy. Donald Trump was threatening to invade Greenland. He was slapping tariffs on nations who had sent troops out there, including the UK. He was, in effect if not in formality, destroying Nato from within.

Not so long ago, we would debate positive political programmes. We would hold international summits on how to help developing countries, or address climate change, or defend Ukraine. No longer. Everything now is negative, a defensive posture against belligerence and madness. These issues have been sacrificed to the great attention-vampire that is Trump.

Our institutions perish. Who now could possibly pretend that Nato exists in any meaningful way, when the US threatens another member state? Who could credibly claim that its deterrence clause is credible?

The same is true across the global institutional landscape. The World Trade Organisation is gone, its appellate court destroyed by American intransigence. The rules based order is finished – Trump’s tariffs are all illegal, but no one even bothers to mention this anymore. The UN is toothless. The EU........

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