The Unprecedented Self-Sabotage: How 2026 Will Be Remembered as the End of the American-Led World Order
What if you woke up one year ago today as either Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, gifted with invisible, total control over every decision emerging from the White House? Your explicit top geopolitical goal: shatter global trust in the United States, and dismantle the 80-year-old Western rules-based order that has kept the peace, enabled America’s rise as an economic superpower, and positioned the country as a global beacon of opportunity and innovation. Is there any move you would make that isn’t already part of Donald Trump’s increasingly reckless agenda since he retook the presidency a year ago?
The answer is simple: nothing.
This week brought three overlapping events that historians will likely one day mark as the official death knell of the post-WWII rules-based international order: Trump’s rambling, nearly two-hour celebration of his first year back in office; the tense, defiant gathering of rattled global elites in snow-covered Davos; and the surreal news that Denmark and its European allies are deploying additional military forces to Greenland explicitly to deter a U.S. seizure. Three separate images, one clear message: the 80-year post-1945 experiment in global order is over.
In the first three weeks of 2026, Trump’s unhinged rants about Greenland have escalated into something far more staggering and alarming than anyone could have predicted. A global superpower is intentionally burning through whatever remaining global trust and alliances it has left—most notably NATO, the most powerful geopolitical alliance in human history—precisely at the moment NATO has emerged more reinvigorated, unified, and larger than at any point in its history, following Russia’s 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine. This is self-sabotage on an unprecedented scale.
Trump’s obsession with Greenland is one of the most bizarre, personal pet projects any sitting U.S. president has ever chased. Seizing control of the Danish territory, home to just 57,000 people and mostly covered in ice more than a mile thick, checks none of the usual boxes for territorial expansion. It is not a long-held conservative priority, not a topic debated in international relations seminars, not even a cause pushed by the farthest fringes of right-wing media. Wall Street has never spent decades lobbying for its acquisition; there is no well-funded astroturf campaign pushing for U.S. control, no indigenous Greenlandic independence movement whispering to D.C. power brokers begging for American annexation, and unlike 19th century Manifest Destiny, there are no hordes of American settlers lining up to homestead there. None of the standard justifications apply—this is purely a Trumpian vanity project.
In fact, thanks to America’s existing global power and its long alliance with Denmark, every U.S. interest in Greenland is already accessible right now. The U.S. already operates a major military base on the island, and once held many more that it voluntarily wound down over decades. While Greenland holds valuable rare earth minerals and its Arctic location could open new trade routes as the ice melts, all of those resources were already open to American businesses and interests, as Denmark has been one of America’s closest and most reliable allies for generations. As for public opinion? Annexing Greenland is one of the most unpopular policies ever measured in U.S. polling: just 17% of Americans back Trump’s push, and only 4% support using military force to seize the island. To put that in perspective: a 2022 survey found roughly 13% of Americans believe in Bigfoot.
Nor is this new imperial ambition coming at a peak of Trump’s domestic political power. His approval rating has dropped steadily since he returned to office, and his signature immigration policies are deeply underwater with voters. Headlines have been dominated by revelations of his once-extremely close ties to the world’s most notorious convicted sex offender. Democrats are flipping seats and winning office by landslide margins, and the Republican House majority is so narrow that Speaker Mike Johnson’s hold on power depends on unpredictable events like car accidents back home in Republican districts. Trump has failed to rally the nation around this cause, and can barely even articulate a coherent vision for it: during his appearance in Davos this week, he referred to “Iceland” multiple times when he meant Greenland. Hours later, he claimed to have struck a “framework for a future deal” with NATO’s secretary-general on Greenland and the Arctic—but even if a deal eventually materializes, the lasting damage to global order is already done, and the trajectory of global politics has shifted permanently.
Pushing for the occupation and annexation of Greenland is pure unfiltered Trumpism, the product of his most unhinged, idiosyncratic thinking. He admitted as much in a rambling, troubling interview with The New York Times earlier this month. When asked “why Greenland?” he answered simply: “Because that’s what I feel is psychologically needed for success.” This is the same worldview Trump outlined decades ago in the Access Hollywood tape: “When you’re a star, they let you do it.” A decade in national politics has done nothing to dissuade him of that belief; he has beaten the system repeatedly, outmaneuvered every opponent, and made history as the first convicted felon ever elected to the White House.
Watching Trump push for the seizure of Greenland is to witness one of the most extraordinary acts by any great power or head of state in the entire modern era of nation-states, which dates back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. It is nearly impossible to find a geopolitical parallel. Leaders and nations have made catastrophic mistakes that led to their own ruin—Napoleon’s invasion of Russia, Austro-Hungary’s actions that sparked World War I—but never before has a global superpower set out to intentionally dismantle the very core foundations of its own national strength and global influence.
For 80 years after World War II, America’s model of innovation, trade, and global hegemony was built on six seemingly unshakable traditions that were upheld by every Democratic and Republican administration alike:
Open access to the U.S. for immigrants, particularly for the world’s best students attending America’s unrivaled universities
Consistent, robust government investment in higher education, medical research, and scientific laboratories
Broad, increasingly open trade access to U.S. markets, with reciprocal access for American goods around the world
Unwavering domestic commitment to the rule of law, which made the U.S. a predictable, safe place to build businesses and innovate
Unquestioning, steady commitment to a network of global alliances that created a global security umbrella backed by the most powerful military in human history
All five of these pillars supported the sixth, equally critical pillar: (6) Politically independent, fiscally prudent monetary policy that established the U.S. dollar as the world’s most reliable reserve currency. This turned U.S. Treasury bonds into the global savings bank for every nation—democracy and authoritarian alike—and made U.S. capital markets and banking systems the go-to destination for any company seeking global investment.
Presidents have always adjusted the edges of this framework—cutting spending here, increasing investment there—and even made fundamental changes, as Richard Nixon did when he took the U.S. off the gold standard in 1971, rewriting the post-WWII Bretton Woods system. But even Nixon understood how the pillars reinforced each other, and kept the U.S. as the steady global leader. It is true that a series of missteps, from the disastrous Iraq War to the 2008 financial crisis to misjudging China’s rise, eroded American power and the unipolar, moral standing the U.S. held on September 11, 2001. But even a quarter century after that peak, the U.S. remained the anchor of global peace, order, and global institutions. It is worth remembering that after the 9/11 attacks, NATO rallied to the U.S. and invoked Article 5 for the first and only time in its history, and tiny Denmark was such a staunch ally that it suffered the third-highest per capita death toll fighting alongside the U.S. in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It is impossible to overstate how much security, wealth, innovation, and opportunity these six foundational pillars delivered to both Americans and people across the globe. To be clear: America’s 80-year reign leading the global order was not without enormous human cost, felt most acutely by people living on the front lines of the Cold War, from Vietnam and Cambodia to Africa and Latin America. But nearly every transformative human achievement of the last 80 years traces its roots back to these six American-led policies: from staggering gains in global public health to the unprecedented reduction of global extreme poverty to the invention of the internet itself. Pick any major global business success, and you will see the impact of this framework. To name just one example: All four of the world’s $4 trillion companies—Nvidia, Alphabet, Microsoft, and Apple—owe much of their success to immigrants or the children of immigrants, who built their businesses in the open, immigrant-friendly system the U.S. maintained for decades.
And yet, over the last year, Donald Trump has systematically undermined every single one of these six pillars—an achievement that even Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping never could have dreamed of pulling off themselves. In just the last few weeks, he has done lasting, irreparable harm to the rule of law, America’s global alliances, and the independence of U.S. monetary policy. In the first three weeks of 2026 alone, projections show U.S. legal immigration could fall by as much as half; top Ph.D. programs are warning they face collapse after a year of the administration’s attacks on science, higher education, and research; Europe and America’s closest trading partners are preparing billions in new tariffs on American goods; masked federal law enforcement, bearing all the hallmarks of a fascist secret police, have occupied a major American city as Trump launches investigations into opposing state and local leaders; and the Federal Reserve chairman has issued a rare, stark public warning about persistent presidential pressure on U.S. monetary policy.
But nowhere are the growing costs more visible than in the crumbling of America’s closest international friendships. Just look at the statements coming out of this year’s Davos gathering: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, leader of America’s closest ally and largest trading partner—whose military is now planning for potential conflict with the U.S. along the world’s longest formerly unguarded border—received a standing ovation for a speech where he declared: “Let me be clear: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen went even further, essentially calling for Europe to achieve full strategic independence from the United States.
This is the end of the world order we have known for 80 years—and it has come for reasons that will confound political scientists and historians for generations. There is no grand strategy behind this act of superpower suicide, only the president’s own narcissism, greed, and frustration at never earning the respect from global elites that he craves above all else.
On one level, Trump’s January 2026 rampage exposes the collective failure of every institution, safeguard, and check and balance the United States thought it had in place to rein in a rogue executive. Chief among these failures is the sheer cowardice of the narrow Republican majority in Congress, which has betrayed the Founders’ core expectation that the legislative branch would defend its own authority against executive overreach, and honor their oath to the Constitution before party loyalty.
Putin and Xi must be stunned by their good fortune; in Davos this week, China is already pitching itself to Europe and the world as the new leader ready to pick up the pieces of the American century. Putin, who has spent a generation’s worth of blood and treasure bogged down in Ukraine, has gotten an unexpected reprieve at the moment he least deserved it. He has spent 25 years in office arguing that the “democratic West” is just as corrupt as his own authoritarian regime—and now, day after day, Donald Trump is giving him endless new evidence to back that claim.
Through most of Trump’s first term, conspiracy theorists argued online that Trump must be a Russian asset; in this second term, we have arrived at a far more horrifying, embarrassing conclusion for American voters, and a far more damning judgment on Trump for history: he is doing all of this entirely of his own free will.
Historian Barbara Tuchman once famously noted that the May 1910 grand funeral of Britain’s King Edward VII—a dazzling procession of mourning that brought together nine kings, seven queens, and 40 other imperial and royal leaders—marked the high point and final gasp of 19th century Europe’s global order, just years before it destroyed itself in World War I and ceded power to the upstart United States across the Atlantic.
Someday, we will tell our children about the month of January 2026 in global politics, and they will not be able to fathom how we brought this collapse on ourselves. Nor will they ever be able to fully comprehend what the United States once meant to the world.
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