COPENHAGEN – When people ask me how I am doing, I generally reply: “I’m fine, but the world is a mess.”
Still, as a Dane, the past few weeks have been particularly difficult and incomparably worse for the people of Greenland. With his assertion that might makes right, his threats to Danish sovereignty, his undermining of the United Nations through a so-called Board of Peace and his commercialization of humanitarian aid, U.S. President Donald Trump has made his worldview plain — and it is deeply troubling.
But the uncomfortable truth is that the world order was already broken before Trump’s first presidency. He didn’t create the dysfunction. He just poured gasoline on the fire and accelerated the decline. The U.N. had long failed to function effectively and the World Trade Organization had ground nearly to a halt. Major regional powers such as India, Brazil and South Africa were openly questioning the legitimacy of an international system that remained wedded to a Western perspective, and that too often failed to reflect their standpoints or accommodate their interests.
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