When Donald Trump stood up at Davos today and repeated his ambition to acquire Greenland, he did more than revive one of his own fixations. He offered a live demonstration of how the world now works. Here was a US president discussing the future of allied territory in the language of interest, security and leverage, not law or precedent. He may have ruled out the use of force, but that did not alter the underlying point: power, not process, was doing the talking.

If anyone still doubts that the post-Cold War rules-based order has given way to something more transactional and harder-edged, Greenland should put the matter beyond dispute. It was an unmistakable reminder of hierarchy, one the liberal order was meant to have erased. Even close allies sit downstream of American priorities when those priorities are asserted bluntly enough.

A day earlier at the same gathering, Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney had described the damage now being done to the alliance-based system the United States once upheld. That system, he argued, depended more on habit and restraint than on genuine consent, and both are fading. Nostalgia, Carney warned, is not a strategy. Trump’s Greenland intervention showed what that erosion looks like in practice.

Trump’s Greenland gambit showed how power is now exercised

There is an irony in the Canadian’s commentary. Carney has long been cast in British debate as the archetype of technocratic liberalism, a defender of global markets, supranational rules and frictionless integration, and a prominent critic of Brexit. Yet his message at Davos was not a plea to restore the old system, but an insistence that its illusions be discarded. Sovereignty, he........

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