:January 2026

So, the end of January. It’s dark and we’re wearing sunglasses but the Delorean has been fired up and we’re all heading back to the future, like it or not, courtesy of the US and its President, one Donald J Trump.

The Americans have abandoned the old rules-based world order, that was established largely by the US after the Second World War to stop the European super powers from starting another world war, and which has completely broken down. But so what? The Western powers never felt bound by the rules, waging wars from Vietnam to Iraq, and toppling governments in South America, Africa and the Middle East whenever those leaders had the temerity to suggest prioritising their own people over Western interests. 

Predictably there has been much wailing across European capitals but for those in the global south nothing has changed: the new boss is the same as the old boss. Trump has taken us all back to the colonial era as he seeks to build a new American empire. A new world order has emerged where raw American power, economic and military, is the new rule. China is the obvious counterpoint to this, leaving India and Russia wondering if this is also their moment to shine.

Looking back over the Notes from the Gallery articles that I’ve written over the last two years it’s obvious that this has been building for some time but accelerated rapidly with Trump’s decision to kidnap the Venezuelan leader, Nicolas Maduro and his wife. He appears to have adopted the same strategy that the British used to rule India; there’s no need to conquer a whole country, just the current dictatorship. After all, the current Venezuelan leaders have allegedly committed enough human rights abuses to know that they are better off running the country to Trump’s orders than facing their own people.

Still, no one is going to mourn Maduro and no one in Europe is going to worry too much about sovereignty in Venezuela or anywhere else in South America. But for Europeans, Trump’s insistence that he would take over Greenland from its current landlords, Denmark, was the final straw.

Helle Thorning-Schmidt, former prime minister of Denmark, told the BBC: “Denmark is a very small country, and both Denmark and Greenland, we simply feel bullied by a much stronger nation.” She added: “We have a fork in the road now and we should be serious about that. That if any kind of hostility happens to Greenland then it is the end of NATO as we know it.”

Several European nations sent token numbers of military personnel to Greenland to deter the Americans from taking a military option, meaning NATO troops being deployed to protect a NATO territory from an active threat – from another NATO member. The fundamental problem for the alliance is that its members are not equal. In reality, NATO is the US military plus its allies; without the US, NATO lacks effective command and control, not to mention intelligence gathering and nuclear capability. 

Trump upped the stakes further by threatening punitive tariffs on eight European countries, including the UK, for opposing his plans to take Greenland. He eventually backed down but the mere threat made a mockery of all the fraught negotiations over tariffs last year. The European leaders have clearly lost patience with Trump but the bottom line remains – that Europe has been too reliant on its cosy partnership with the US and there is no quick and easy route around this. The European governments will have to choose between surrendering to Trump or carrying out a complete restructuring of their economies to cope with this new reality – which will inevitably mean putting up taxes to pay for it. Even now they will be trying to figure out which of these choices will cost them more at the ballot box.

All this has led to renewed efforts to secure some kind of peace deal in Ukraine. Nothing much has changed here; the Russians continue to demand large tranches of Ukrainian territory that they have not yet managed to capture; the Americans continue to pressure the Ukrainians to give in to this. No one is paying much attention to the Europeans, who are too weak to defend themselves, let alone Ukraine, at least for now and probably for the next decade or more.

The Europeans have only just understood that they will have to fund their own defence but have not yet thought through the full implications of this. After all, America has reaped the rewards from investing in European defence. They certainly didn’t do it out of largesse, but mainly in the belief that it would be better to fight a devastating ground war that might lead to a nuclear holocaust on European rather than American soil. And the US has been able to establish many military bases all over Europe, which it has been able to use to gather intelligence, for logistics and even to launch strikes. There’s no suggestion that America wants to give up these bases but the political and military justification for hosting them will rapidly diminish once the Europeans start growing their own military capability. 

January ended with Trump busy demonstrating his skills as a peacemaker by sending several warships to the Persian Gulf to back up his threats on the Iranian leadership. Yet, it feels as if Trump has moved too slowly. Protesters had been out on the streets in Iran since December, initially demonstrating over the weak economy, before demanding the end of the regime. But the security forces clearly remain loyal to the Iranian leadership, and appear to have killed many thousands in a brutal crackdown that has put an end to the protests. It remains to be seen if Trump will attack the Iranian regime or just resort to name calling. Imagine the fear amongst the ayatollahs: “But what will we do if he uses CAPITAL LETTERS?”

Meanwhile, Trump’s Board of Peace proposal for Gaza, which could yet bear fruit, has started to look more like the kind of shakedown that we are coming to expect from Trump. Various unsavoury characters such as the Russian president Vladimir Putin have been invited to join. It appears that members wishing to stay beyond their initial three year remit will have to pay $1 billion, with the money controlled directly by Trump without any kind of oversight. Trump has named himself president of the board for life, despite his term as president of the US supposedly ending in three years. Then again, it’s entirely likely that Trump isn’t planning on handing power back at the end of his allotted term in office – that’s a whole other nightmare that the NATO countries won’t want to consider. 

Nor is there any sign that the American people really want to go there. Yet Trump has ridden roughshod over state-level government and sent heavily armed federal agents into many American cities, which has so far resulted in two American citizens being shot dead. No wonder that photojournalists now routinely wear bulletproof vests to cover protests in the US. It’s worth remembering that policing in a democracy is through consent; otherwise you end up with a police state.

Trump told the New York Times that there was only one limit to his power: “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.” Trump went on to say that he didn’t need international law and that he had the right to use the full might of the US military and economy to assert his will over other nations. Given that a US court has previously found Trump guilty of sexual assault, and that his election ended several cases against him for fraud, his own morality doesn’t seem like much of a safeguard.