Global leaders dreaming of a US-free world order. Do they stand a chance?

The Guardian -  Donald Trump came to believe that every other country treated the US as a chump, free riding on its security guarantee and abusing its open market – no matter that the United States set most of the rules underpinning the postwar architecture, and broke them when it suited its interests, or that the rules enabled an era of remarkable American prosperity.

In an act of bravery not often experienced among the jet setters in the Swiss Alps, the 

Canadian prime minister challenged every other country to accept the loss of American leadership and build an alternative global architecture that might bypass the great powers intent on bending everybody else to their will.

“Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited,” he said. “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”

The analysis is catching like wildfire. A couple of weeks after Carney’s speech, the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, opened the Munich Security Conference arguing that “the international order based on rights and rules is currently being destroyed”. He warned that the “leadership claim of the US is being challenged, perhaps already lost”.

The report prepared for the gathering in Munich articulated well the general feeling of America’s (erstwhile) friends. “For generations, US allies were not just able to rely on American power but on a broadly shared understanding of the principles underpinning the international order,” it noted. Washington has betrayed that understanding. “As a result, more than 80 years after construction began, the US-led post-1945 international order is now under destruction.”