It feels odd to describe a speech as “good news” when it involves the president of the United States rambling incessantly and threatening America’s European allies. But, taken one way, Donald Trump’s stark raving mad speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Wednesday was good news.

A day earlier, the stock markets had tumbled, for two related reasons. One was that Trump continued to escalate his threats to seize Greenland by military force, a move that would almost certainly mean the end of the NATO alliance. The second was that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney—whose country has long been one of America’s closest allies, if not its closest—gave a rousing speech at Davos about the need for a new global order without the U.S. as its leader.

“I will talk today about the breaking of the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a brutal reality where the geopolitics of the great powers is not subject to any constraint,” he said. “Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” He later added, “The middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

This was a potential inflection point. The United States was at risk of losing its hegemonic position in the West, for what may be the dumbest imaginable reason: Trump wants Greenland because it looks very big on a map, and perhaps because the U.S. once temporarily protected it.

Trump’s speech was demented. There were several moments when he talked up American military supremacy in a way that was clearly........

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