U.S. President Donald Trump stands on the stage prior to addressing a meeting of Global Business Leaders at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press

The War of the Greenlandic Accession appears to have ended before it began, the President of the United States having supposedly negotiated a deal on the island’s future with the Secretary-General of NATO, a deal that a) no one can describe in any detail, b) neither of them has any mandate to negotiate and c) appears to amount to a ratification of the status quo.

Still, the past few weeks have not been a complete waste. They have almost certainly brought an end to NATO as a credible military alliance. They have demonstrated, to a degree that should convince any remaining doubters, that Donald Trump is completely out of his skull. And they have put the final nail in the strategy of accommodating him. There will be no more attempts to flatter, bribe or otherwise sweet-talk the toddler President. America’s allies are done with Mr. Trump – and to a lesser extent, America.

Hence the extraordinary reaction to the Prime Minister’s Davos speech. It has been, to be sure, wildly overpraised. The rhetoric is not particularly eloquent, the insights not especially scintillating. Its main recommendation, that middle powers should lessen their exposure to the great powers by trading more with each other, is essentially warmed-over friendshoring.

Its impact, rather, comes from its candour, its clarity, and, perhaps most of all, its timing. Had Mark Carney delivered the same speech even six months ago, the response from other world leaders might have been a weary, “Yes, you’re right, but.” As it was, it detonated with the force of half a ton of gelignite. Mr. Carney crystallized the rebellious mood in the room, giving it meaning, direction and hope.

Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks during the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday.Markus Schreiber/The Associated Press

The central metaphor, Václav Havel’s famous parable of the shopkeeper in a communist state who keeps a sign in his window parroting a regime slogan, though he does not believe in it, seems inapt at first. The point of the story was that the willingness of the shopkeeper, and other like him, to repeat something everyone knows to be untrue – in Havel’s phrase, to “live within a lie” – is what really sustained the regime.

Likewise, Mr. Carney describes the “rules-based international order” that prevailed for the last several decades as having been something of “a pleasant fiction,” one that the richer nations pretended to believe in so long as it seemed to deliver, but which we must now admit is gone forever. It is time, he says, for all these countries to “take their signs down.”

But the RBIO was not a totalitarian order: it was a voluntary association of states – one that, moreover, broadly worked. If we are indeed witnessing its collapse, it is not because those in its thrall discovered a collective will to resist it, but because the great power most responsible for making it work, the United States, has suddenly and willfully decided to throw it in the trash can.

Never mind. I suspect........

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