In 1978, Václav Havel, the Czech playwright, dissident, and future President, wrote an essay, distributed clandestinely, that tells of a greengrocer who hangs a sign in his shopwindow reading “Workers of the World, Unite!” He doesn’t actually believe in this hollow slogan, nor do his customers—rather, they are all engaged in a performative ritual, a paean to a Communist system, which, through their act, they help perpetuate.
On January 20th, the Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, recalled Havel’s essay at the World Economic Forum, in Davos, Switzerland, during a speech that, for one delivered by a head of state, offered a rare degree of intellectual, even emotional, candor. Carney applied the condition of Havel’s greengrocer to the rules-based international order that came into being after the Second World War, much of it backstopped by the United States and wielded to its benefit. Even as powerful countries regularly acted as they pleased and international laws and regulations were applied with “varying rigor,” a nominal allegiance to a world of norms and to win-win coöperation endured.
“American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea-lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes,” Carney said. And it undergirded NATO, an alliance that had allowed for an unprecedented near-century of peace. That order, however imperfect, had more benefit than downside. So, Carney said of Canada and its European allies, “we placed the sign in the window.”
But the first year of Donald Trump’s second term has made the downside impossible to ignore. Last April, on “Liberation Day,” Trump announced a twenty-per-cent tariff on E.U. members. (“They rip us off,” he said.) His attempts to end the war in Ukraine featured an unmistakable sympathy for Vladimir Putin, while indicating that the war is really Europe’s problem, anyway, and that it shouldn’t count on the U.S. for significant military or financial support. Just after New Year’s, when Trump sent U.S. troops to Venezuela to seize President Nicolás Maduro, he suggested that more such actions would follow, telling the Times, “I don’t need international law.”
Yet nothing has thrown the diverging paths of the U.S. and Europe into plain view more than the crisis over Greenland, an autonomous Arctic territory that is part of the Kingdom of Denmark. For the past year, Trump has said that he intended to take possession of the island, with its militarily strategic location and its abundant, if difficult-to-access, rare earths. Only the U.S. can defend Greenland from the likes of Russia and China, he argued, telling Congress, “We’re going to get it one way or the other.” That is, the signal member of NATO, a collective-security body based on the principles of mutual self-defense, was threatening to seize the territory of another member.