The League of Nations was formed in January 1920 at the Paris Peace Conference that formally ended the First World War. Horrified by the mass deaths the Great War had caused, world leaders swore to champion amity among nations. The League limped on until 1946 but effectively died in 1939, when Adolf Hitler invaded Poland and launched the Second World War. Now here’s the crazy thing: the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to American President Woodrow Wilson for having initiated the idea, but the US itself never joined the League, which is considered one of the primary reasons for its failure. Not to mention that members like Britain and France proved unctuously eager to humour Hitler and Mussolini despite numerous red flags.
Now, 80 years after the UN was created by a world shocked at the even worse horrors and bloodshed of the Second World War, the US is threatening to destroy it with something called the Board of Peace, once again a US President is eyeing the Nobel Peace Prize, and once again Europe is bleating even after Donald Trump shredded the rule book to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.
At Davos this year, that grand carnival of rich hypocrisies, when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney said the global rules-based order was collapsing, commentators said he had spoken the “quiet part out loud”, but Trump has no need to be quiet. In a January memo to the Pentagon, his administration rued the squandering of America’s military strength to “uphold cloud-castle abstractions like the rules-based international order”.
“Cloud-castle abstractions.” Was that all it was? From the Enlightenment of the 17th century that ushered in the age of reason to the French Revolution of the 18th century that laid down the foundational concepts of liberty, equality, and fraternity to the grand resonance of the Emma Lazarus sonnet, the West has always worn the halo of saviourhood with fashionable ease. That halo has been knocked askew often since then, most visibly in the recent support of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, but Trump’s gangsterism in Venezuela finally destroyed the West’s self-projection as defender of the rule of law.
The US and Europe have always been hyphenated—the latter has consistently cheered NATO’s eastward expansion that provoked Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; tangoed with the US to grow the new “empire”; issued letters of support for the US invasion of Iraq. Until now, when Trump has broken the beautiful romance by coveting Greenland and refusing to bankroll Europe’s defence.
It is not Carney but Trump who has spoken the quiet part out loud; with typical boorish candour, he has called out all that guff about a “rules-based” global order (Whose rules? Favourable to whom? Whose exchange rates? Which passports? Which skin colours?) for what it is: “cloud-castle abstractions”. Or, in more Trumpian language, pie in the sky.
Strangely, the uneasy era of treaties and truces he has so rudely disrupted was largely beneficial to the West, with Washington-dominated institutions advancing American interests and culture. But even the few concessions it made to peacekeeping and the sovereignty of nations was too much for Trump’s infantile need to show the world who’s daddy. That Trump supports far-right, neo-fascist, white supremacist groups in Europe and at home; that the first nations to join the Board of Peace are the likes of Israel, Türkiye, Hungary, and Pakistan; that flattery and money can win Trumpian favour with oily ease are all omens of the further global derangements looming ahead of us that, in an eerie way, mirror the crazed avarice, malice, and narcissism wrought by social media and AI.
If, as our culture columnist Prathyush Parasuraman says, this is a world where “trolling is traction”, then rent-extraction is the new, and only, “rule” in the global order heralded by Trump. Until now, despite some dazzling duplicity, the fear of all-out war impelled big powers to follow the “rules”. But when the most powerful nation’s leader acts like he is at a game console, where he can zap opponents, collect booty, and move to the next level, it is not so much a brave new world we are entering as a perilous new world. Is this the point where I revise “may the force be with you” to say, “may you be protected from the force”?
Our Cover Story this fortnight looks at this roiling world and was put together by Ashutosh Bhardwaj, who has also written a piece.
date:2026-02-11 02:38:00
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