Continental drift: America, Europe, and the new power politics

As the snow settles on the great Greenland war that never was, the cracks in the Atlantic alliance widen like melting ice packs in the Arctic spring. The “rules-based international order,” that white whale of the golden age of globalization, is declared dead — if it ever existed in the first place. We hear that President Donald Trump has opened a new and dismal age of brute force, though political orders are always underpinned by threats of violence. We also hear, especially from Trump, that the Western alliance is reviving and that the slackers of European NATO are following American orders to rearm — while European leaders and the Canadian prime minister tell their nations that they must now form a “middle-tier” between Washington and