Donald Trump and the End of American PowerTerry Moran

The World Economic Forum, held annually in Davos, has always been something of a marvel of collective self-regard: thousands of influential people arriving on private jets to discuss the world’s problems most of which are sitting in the same room.

I went there once. ABC News sent me in January 2018 to cover President Donald Trump’s first visit to Davos. I remember two things: how beautiful the place is, and how the attendees even then felt that Trump’s arrival was tolling the death knell for their hopes of a better, more cooperative world; a vision that still clung to the conference despite the billionaires, private planes, and the frenzy of networking and connections.

Davos sits high in the Alps. Wooden and stone chalets are tucked away in pine forests, and peaks rise sharply and serenely. On a sunny day, those mountains stretch into an electric-blue sky that almost blinds you; the human drama below seems small and fleeting. It is a place that invites reflection—or at least it should.

Donald Trump went to Davos this year and did what he usually does: he shouted and attacked. Trump has always confused volume with strength, dominance with leadership, and grievance with strategy. We are all used to that. But this time, it felt different.

Trump’s speech in Davos was not merely the rambling nonsense of a campaign rally, nor even a long list of his smoldering resentments. It was something far more consequential than that. It was a declaration explicit, unembarrassed, and revealing of a worldview that announces the end of an era of American power.

Henry Kissinger an astute student of history and power and a master of compressed phrasing—once said: “Trump may be one of those figures who appear from time to time to announce the end of an era and force it to relinquish its old pretenses.” Kissinger was ninety-five when he said that, and he was right. Trump fits the description exactly.

What Kissinger did not say because it is not always true is that such figures are often constructive, sensing in their historical moment new opportunities for power, stability, success, and cohesion. They replace what they destroy with something new.

Napoleon ended dynasties and built the modern centralized state.
Franklin Roosevelt rejected generations of laissez-faire economics in America and wrote a new social contract for the country: the New Deal.
Deng Xiaoping ended Maoism in China and invented state-led capitalism with a hard political grip.

Donald Trump, by contrast, is an ending without a beginning.

Trump’s Davos speech stripped away the last remnants of ambiguity about his view of the world. In his bare, unadorned mind and his nihilistic ethics, there are only two kinds of countries and two kinds of people: those who are exploited and those who exploit. Power is always a zero-sum game. Cooperation is either weakness or a con. Trust is for fools.

There is no sense in Trump’s rhetoric that American power ever rested on anything other than raw force and pressure. There is no acknowledgment that many countries chose, over decades, to align with the United States not because they were coerced, but because they trusted us. They believed that we were on the whole stable, decent, and predictable. There were many exceptions, of course but as a general rule, it was true. Trump treats this entire edifice of trust as a scam. Something for suckers.

And so, piece by piece, he dissipates the very thing he claims to restore: America’s greatness.

What Trump does not seem to understand or does not care about is that power based solely on fear is fragile power. Because states will always hedge against a country that cannot be trusted at all. Markets will price in the instability created by amoral leadership. And our allies will begin, quietly and gradually, to disengage from us and move on.

When I covered Trump’s visit to Davos in 2018, the prevailing attitude toward him was wary and tinged with contempt. He was like a big, strange dog in the house a problem, smelly, but containable. This time, Trump’s speech and the record of the first year of his second term convinced all the “men of Davos” and “women of Davos” that history will not wait while everyone exchanges business cards. Davos has always been performative. But Trump is not performing. And they know it.

The United States under Donald Trump is no longer a reliable steward of the international order it once led. An era is ending because the country that underwrote it no longer believes in it.

And here is where Mark Carney enters the picture.

Standing on the same Davos stage this week, the Canadian prime minister delivered the clearest counterargument to Trump offered by any democratic leader so far. Carney rejected the soft nostalgia for the “rules-based international order,” rejected pretending that it still works as advertised, or that it can simply be revived as it once was. He said that was a lie, and he urged other middle powers to stop playing along.

Carney’s argument is simple: a world governed by Trump’s purely transactional, amoral dealings will be poorer, more fragile, and more dangerous. In confronting this danger, Carney made an obvious point one deeply rooted in history that when great powers abandon even the pretense of rule-following, other countries do not rush to submit. Trump thinks they do, and he is wrong. Countries adapt always adapt by diversifying, building new alliances, finding new areas of cooperation, and building resilience together. They push back against coerced dominance.

Where Trump sees only dominance or submission, Carney sees a third path: shared power. This is not naïveté. It is not sentimentality. It is realism with a moral backbone.

In 1945, amid the ruins of Europe, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson warned that the ultimate danger threatening us all was not merely brute force, but the abandonment of reason itself. At Nuremberg, he said that the trials of Nazi war criminals were “the greatest tribute that power has ever paid to reason.”

Trump is instinct without intellect. Grievance without judgment. Appetite without restraint. He may indeed be the man who ends an era. But he will not build what comes after it. Others—quietly, persistently, and without waiting for America already are.