If there was a sense of panic gripping European leaders at last week’s conclave of elites at the World Economic Forum, they could be forgiven a moment of relief as they departed the snowy peaks of Davos.
That was not only because US President Donald Trump used a long, rambling speech to rule out taking the Danish territory of Greenland by force.

Nor was it just the meeting on the sidelines with Nato chief Mark Rutte, which produced a formula to defuse immediate tensions by designating US military bases on the island as sovereign territory and getting Trump to drop his related tariff threat.

Instead, the relief appeared to come from a different kind of release: the catharsis of saying the quiet part out loud.

Over the course of the week, a succession of European leaders took to the Davos stage to acknowledge publicly what had long been discussed in private, and which many other parts of the world had taken as a given for years: that the rules-based order on which modern Europe was built had gone.

In this vein, the Greenland episode crystallised another point long understood in much of the world, but which is only now dawning on Europe – that law no longer reliably constrains power.

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Trump tells Davos ‘make your products in America’ or pay tariffs

Trump tells Davos ‘make your products in America’ or pay tariffs