The world owes Donald Trump a note of gratitude. For years, global leaders indulged the fiction that they were partners in a noble alliance. They thought they were co-authors of a rules-based international order, respected adults at the table of history.
Trump, with his gift for demagoguery, has performed a public service by stripping away the euphemisms. He has reminded Canada, Europe, India, and a host of other so-called “middle powers” that they were not “allies” so much as vassals, competing to be the most agreeable subordinate in an empire that preferred the term “leadership” to “domination.”
For decades, this arrangement worked because it was comfortable. Countries that deferred to Washington told themselves that submission was cooperation, that obedience was shared values. They supported American interventions, sanctions regimes, trade wars, and covert destabilisations with the serene confidence that the blowback would land somewhere else.
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