Donald Trump unveiled his “Board of Peace” at the World Economic Forum in Davos this morning. Twenty-four countries have signed up to the US president’s would-be rival to the UN, including Hungary, Turkey and several Gulf states. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper says the UK isn’t yet ready to join because of concerns about Vladimir Putin’s possible involvement. Trump stayed tight-lipped about the “framework for a future deal” on Greenland announced yesterday. The US president dropped his tariff threats after speaking to Nato chief Mark Rutte, reportedly on topics including the renegotiation of a pact governing the stationing of US troops in Greenland and how to increase US investments in the semi-autonomous Danish territory. UK government borrowing fell sharply to a lower-than-expected £11.6bn in December, thanks to rising tax revenues. According to the Office for National Statistics, the deficit was 38% lower than in the same month a year earlier. Economist Ruth Gregory tells the FT the public finances are “finally showing signs of improvement”.

Seventy years ago, says Janan Ganesh in the FT, Britain and France tried to take the Suez Canal by force. Neither was led by an obvious jingo, but as these two declining powers showed, “status anxiety makes sensible people do rash things”. America’s decline is not as sharp as theirs back then – it remains the strongest country on Earth, just by a reduced margin – but in a sense its fall is worse. Britain could console itself that it was handing the world over to a “democratic, anglophone and mostly white superpower”. America has lost ground to China, with which it shares nothing. So the experience of decline, though less steep, might be more harrowing. Add to this Donald Trump’s personal obsession with status, and you get the mistreatment of Greenland, the gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean and other “Suez-style” attempts to recover lost prestige.

The truth is that even under a “normal” president, the US might be “behaving badly around about now”. It is a rare superpower that takes decline well. And America was already chafing at the “rules-based international order” back when George W Bush was in office: think not just of Iraq, but of his “extreme disregard” for the International Criminal Court. (The latter is no complaint against him – he was right to mistrust left-wing “global flummery”.) For those who doubt America’s decline – pointing, perhaps, to its extraordinary economic and technological gains in recent decades – consider the limited effectiveness of US sanctions in recent years, the inability to maintain a lead in AI, and the winnowing of its military supremacy over China. Forget Trump. Under these circumstances, “even a garden variety Republican president would be lashing out”.

🏛️🤔 Ignore the old Thucydides line that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”. The US was at its mightiest in 1946, when it made half the manufactured goods in the world and held a nuclear monopoly. What did Washington do with all this power? Set up the Marshall Plan and Nato, and rebuilt Germany and Japan as pacifist democracies. The belligerent turn in American behaviour has come during its relative decline.