MAKE IT MAKE SENSE: You’ll find out

Donald Trump’s designs on Greenland threaten a rupture in the international order -- so we asked an expert to lay out the rules of engagement in a world without rules

In today’s letter: At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Donald Trump’s threat to take Greenland seems to have been defused, for now. But what would a conflict between the U.S. and Europe even look like?

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When we talked to the economist Joseph Stiglitz back in the spring of 2024, he’d just published a book considering a question that was on the minds of many of his colleagues and peers: with neoliberalism — the guiding principle of the postwar world — having run its course, what kind of order might replace it?

Would it be a “good society” based on progressive values of democracy, cooperation, and freedom? Or a nationalist, authoritarian world, dominated by populist demagogues and defined by the exercise of power?

Donald Trump’s ramped-up threats over the past month to acquire Greenland — and, if necessary, to blow up the longstanding international alliances that built post-World War II peace and prosperity to possess the Arctic island — have made it clear that the question is no longer hypothetical.

So how does the world work now?