America’s Western allies have had enough — or so they say.
This week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, one world leader after another expressed frustration with the United States over its increasingly hostile behavior toward them and called for a new path forward.
According to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, it’s time for Europe to seek a permanent break with the U.S. “Nostalgia will not bring back the old order,” said von der Leyen. “It’s time to seize this opportunity and build a new independent Europe.”
If all this talk sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve heard it before.
“So many red lines are being crossed,” said Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever in response to President Donald Trump’s threat to impose tariffs over Greenland, “that you have the choice between your self-respect — being a happy vassal is one thing. Being a miserable slave is something else.”
“Europe has very strong tools now, and we have to use them when we are not respected,” huffed French President Emmanuel Macron.
But perhaps the most direct criticism of Trump — and call for a new world order — came from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who told the assembled global elite, “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” Carney declared that “great powers … using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited,” cannot continue.
“We live in an era of great-power rivalry,” said Carney. “The rules-based order is fading,” and “middle powers [such as Canada] must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”
These comments are the logical endpoint of Trump’s first year in office, in which he has seemingly gone out of his way to stick a finger in the eye of key NATO allies and undermine some of America’s most enduring and beneficial bilateral relationships.
But if all this talk sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve heard it before.
In the waning days of the Cold War, Luxembourg’s Prime Minister and President of the Council of Europe, Jacques Loos, infamously declared, “This is the hour of Europe, not the hour of the Americans.”
In February 2003, as America prepared to go to war in Iraq and U.S. leaders were sneering at America’s “old” European allies, French President Jacques Chirac warned of a unipolar world dominated by the U.S. and said “Europe must realize the importance of expressing its own vision of world problems and of supporting it with a common, credible defense.”
In 2017, after a disastrous G-7 summit with Trump, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said, “The days when Europe could rely on others were over,” and argued that Europe must take its fate into its own hands.
But a funny thing happened next.
Loos was referring to the unfolding war in the former Yugoslavia, and while many European leaders believed that the time had come for Europe to look after its own continent’s affairs, it was U.S. military might combined with diplomatic heft that brought an end to the conflict in the Balkans.
Perhaps this time is different, and America’s allies have reached their breaking point with America’s bullying and dalliance with unilateralism. But skepticism is warranted.
In 2009, when President Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush in the White House, Europe returned to the tried-and-true paradigm of following America’s lead on the world stage. In 2021, when Joe Biden arrived in the Oval Office, the same pattern emerged again. And when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it was once again the U.S. that took the lead in assembling a European coalition to oppose Vladimir Putin’s military aggression.
Perhaps this time is different, and America’s allies have reached their breaking point with America’s bullying and dalliance with unilateralism. But skepticism is warranted.
As Chris Fettweis, a professor of international affairs at Tulane University, said to me, “People always think we’re on the cusp of a new world order … and they’re usually wrong.” Indeed, one striking element of Carney’s Davos speech was how powerfully the Canadian prime minister spoke about the importance of multilateralism and the dangers of great powers going it alone. “A world of fortresses,” he said, “will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable. … If great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate.” Carney’s vision of multilateralism, laid out in Davos, was offered as a hedge against American bullying and a path for middle-power countries to follow, so long as America is in the grip of Trump’s mania and know-nothingness. In recent weeks, Canada has acted on Carney’s words. Ottawa has reduced trade barriers with China, including a deal last week with Beijing that will increase the importation of electric vehicles in return for China easing restrictions on Canadian agricultural imports. French President Emmanuel Macron also spoke in Davos of encouraging more Chinese investment in Europe. But Carney surely knows that for Canada, which is so uniquely dependent on the U.S. as a trading partner, a partnership of middle powers won’t outweigh a full American heel turn toward rogue nation status. The same is almost certainly true of Europe. America’s allies might be exasperated by Trump’s behavior, but they, too, prefer a return to the status quo over any other potential outcome. Great and occasionally benevolent powers like the U.S. do not grow on trees, and an economic and political alliance with China for Canada and Europe is not really on the table. Indeed, there was another implicit message in Carney’s words — and indeed they can be heard in the words of nearly every European leader who decries what America has become: Come back to reality! All that Trump has seemingly broken can still be put back together again. For all of Trump’s excesses and belligerent rhetoric, he has left mostly hurt feelings in his wake. Trump hasn’t pulled the U.S. out of NATO. He has largely maintained American support for Ukraine. And on Wednesday night, Trump announced he was calling off his threatened trade war with Europe after having “formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland” — which The New York Times reports will likely be little more than “a compromise in which Denmark would give the United States sovereignty over small pockets of Greenlandic land where the United States could build military bases.” In other words, all that Trump has seemingly broken can still be put back together again. Canadian and European leaders are no doubt frustrated and infuriated by how uncertain an ally the U.S. has become and by how frequently this pattern of misbehavior has repeated itself over the past 25 years. But make no mistake, they would almost certainly welcome a sane America back with open arms.
Michael Cohen is an MSNBC columnist. He is also the publisher of the newsletter Truth and Consequences and hosts the weekly podcast That ‘70s Movie Podcast. 
