Editor’s Note: This article is published ahead of New Coalitions for a New World, the opening panel at CIC Couchiching 2026. Join the conversation on October 7 at the Aga Khan Museum as leading voices examine the partnerships Canada needs in a more fragmented world.

Museums must respond to the momentous geopolitical shifts playing out today. Nothing has been more indicative of these shifts as on 2 April 2025, when United States President Donald Trump announced massive, unprecedented tariffs that included everybody from friends to adversaries. These tariffs were intended to “liberate” the US by creating freedom from foreign dependencies, such as imports, protect and rebuild American industry, and create a fairer trade system for the US. Together, in Trump’s view, this was supposed to achieve “liberation” from a system that he perceives as having unfairly treated the US. While liberation usually refers to achieving freedom from military occupation or the end of oppression, the moment certainly heralded that the world is changing. With the US turning its back on the international trade system that it had helped build and sustain for decades, analysts were noting that these changes marked a decisive departure from the post-World War II and the post-Cold War world order. Upending the trade system is the symptom of a broader transformation.

More than one year after “Liberation Day,” these changes are affecting how museums should engage globally by way of their own museum diplomacy, and how it should evolve in response to a shifting global order. With the geopolitical context that has underpinned museum work fundamentally changing, business as usual approaches need to be rethought and adapted if not radically overhauled for the new age that we are finding ourselves in collectively. I argue for a more assertive, institution‑driven model for museum diplomacy, one that is globally literate, locally grounded, and sufficiently agile to meet emerging global challenges and to infuse collaborations with renewed purpose.

As stated above, the developments affecting the trade system are not happening in isolation. They are part of a broader pattern of change. From the perspective of the US, which, over the past year has been seen as the main instigator of these changes, these also include the US’s withdrawal from international institutions and agreements, the scaling back of international aid and public diplomacy efforts, challenges to alliances, and the weakening and ignoring of international law. In his much-regarded speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January 2026, Canadian prime minister Mark Carney spoke of a “rupture”, the end of the world order as we know it. Such comments were echoed by other leaders, such as German federal chancellor Friedrich Merz, who, at the Munich Security Conference a month later, claimed that the established order “no longer exists”. The entire conference stood under the motto “under destruction”.

These somber assessments should be tempered by the clarification that the American-led world order had long its winners and losers and had certainly not benefitted everybody equally. While it has been based on free trade, multilateralism, alliances and rules-based cooperation, it certainly served and was upheld by the US as the post-Cold War hegemon, and thereby........

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