It does not require the acuity of a Kissinger or an Acheson to grasp that the international rules-based order is in desperately poor health. The impending second presidency of Donald Trump is a challenge to the framework of global politics and diplomacy that it may not survive.

As he approaches another term, Trump has already raised some startling notions. Before Christmas, he suggested Canada should become the 51st of the United States; called the Panama Canal a “vital national asset” and said that unless fees for its use were lowered he would “demand” that it “be returned to us, in full, quickly and without question”; and announced that “the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity” for the national security of the U.S., reviving a 2019 proposal to buy it from Denmark.

This is not so much old-fashioned power politics so much as antediluvian, an approach to territorial claims and sovereignty that was supposed to have ended in the aftermath of World War II and the signing of the U.N. Charter in 1945.

During the Cold War, international relations were framed by the global competition between East and West. But that competition was regulated, and conducted in acknowledgment of the existence of the U.N., the International Court of Justice, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund — which emerged from the

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