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 rules of the liberal international order that the United States itself had created. Beijing, it turned out, understood Washington better than many of America’s allies did: appeasing a predatory hegemon doesn’t work.

What does work — as I learned when I led Canada’s first renegotiation of NAFTA as the minister of foreign affairs in 2018 — is using the bargaining chips you have, including retaliating when you are attacked.

In 2026 we should all learn that lesson. This should be the year that liberal democracy fights back, in earnest. In many ways, that fight is already underway. It began in countries like my own and Australia, where what had seemed like likely election victories for the populist right were stymied by a surge of patriotic resistance. A few months later, Norway and the Netherlands followed suit.

Then U.S. voters had their turn. On Nov. 4, Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill, both centrist Democrats, triumphed in the governors’ races in Virginia and New Jersey; a democratic socialist, Zohran Mamdani, was elected mayor of New York City; Katie B. Wilson, a progressive transit activist, was elected mayor of Seattle; an aggressive redistricting measure was passed overwhelmingly in California; Taylor Rehmet flipped a reliably Republican State Senate district in Texas; and down-ballot Democrats prevailed in nearly every other competitive race.

There are, of course, counterexamples, like the victories of the populist right in a recent presidential election in Poland and in parliamentary elections in the Czech Republic, the success of extreme right candidates in Latin America and the rise of the right-wing populist Nigel Farage’s Reform U.K. party in the United Kingdom. But it is crucial to recognize victories by liberals and progressives, too, because the biggest threat to liberal democracy in 2025 was the defeatist temptation to just throw in the towel and accept the thesis that all that uplifting stuff about the arc of history was sentimental claptrap, and that the age of monsters had begun.

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