Let’s remember that before Donald Trump’s latest tilt at Greenland, he had also set his sights on annexing Panama and Canada, and had sent troops into Venezuela. Mexico has been in his sights, while he has also delighted in propping up like-minded autocrats in several Latin American states.

And yet no one appeared to be willing to call a halt to it all, terrified of offending the new emperor.

In a remarkable speech in Davos at last week’s World Economic Forum, Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney spoke through the fog of the conference’s usual diplomatic niceties of “a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality... It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.” The rules-based order is a pretence that the whole thing wasn’t fundamentally about American hegemony.

Many fellow middle-ranking powers have long chafed silently against an order they felt made some countries more equal than others, but which, all the while, they benefited from “American hegemony, in particular, [which] helped provide public goods: open sea lanes,........

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