Nils Gilman
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney didn’t come to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January to offer hope. He came to pronounce a death. The liberal international order—that elaborate architecture of institutions, norms, and U.S.-guaranteed public goods constructed in the aftermath of World War II—was over, he announced, and the rupture was irreversible. But Carney’s eulogy, sober and precise as it was, understated the depth of the break.
U.S. President Donald Trump isn’t merely ending a set of diplomatic arrangements or a particular configuration of great-power relations. He is presiding over the end of the fossil-fueled model of industrial civilization that made the liberal order possible, profitable, and, for a time, politically sustainable. Trump didn’t initiate the decline of fossil fuels’ global metabolic hegemony; it was instigated by the manifest instability posed by climate change and rivalrous oil-access impediments like the U.S.-Israeli war on Iran. But he has ensured a rivalrous competition, rather than a smooth transition, to replace it.
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