The Great Capitulation Is Over. What Will Take Its Place?

Ms. Freeland is a former deputy prime minister, minister of foreign affairs and minister of finance of Canada.

Looking back, we will remember 2025 as the year of the great capitulation. It was the year liberal democracy lost its nerve, as law firms, universities, media organizations, corporations and countries appeased an increasingly illiberal United States in an unseemly and miscalculated scramble to get the best possible deals for themselves.

Paradoxically, only China — hardly an avatar of liberal democracy — had the political will and the economic leverage to stand up to an American administration bent on rewriting the........

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