"the West", bound together by shared values, head the United States of America

I had been asked to give a keynote speech at a conference at Columbia University's Journalism School. It was January 2002. Two planes had been flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center months earlier 

In my speech I made a few opening remarks about what the United States had meant to me. "I was born 15 years after the Second World War," I said, "in a world America made. The peace and security and increasing prosperity of the Western Europe that I was born into was in large part an American achievement."

American military might had won the war in the West, I continued. It had stopped the further westward expansion of Soviet power.

In that moment I thought how lucky my generation - and his - had been, to be alive in an era in which the international system was regulated by rules - a world that had turned its back on the unconstrained power of the Great Powers.

Donald  declared that Denmark had only "added one more dog sled" to defend the territory. That speaks volumes to the undisguised contempt with which he and many in his inner circle appear to hold certain European allies.

But, as the young Pakistani student at Columbia journalism school argued all those years ago, to large parts of the rest of the world it has not seemed, in the last 80 years, that the US, and on occasions some of its friends, felt restrained by rules.

During the Cold War, the main motivation for intervention was the perception that Soviet-backed parties were gaining ground domestically, representing Communist advances into the Western hemisphere. 

In our own day, the perceived enemy is no longer Communism, but drug-trafficking and migration.

Allan Little BBC Senior correspondent 25 January 2026

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c99kkerr93ko

 “There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.” The quote, often attributed to Lenin, aptly describes the first weeks of 2026. 

Over the last generation, several assumptions undergirded international relations and commerce. 

Shared values would always unite the U.S. with Western democracies, the global production of everything from semiconductors to oil made economic interdependence unavoidable, and an independent U.S. Federal Reserve and an infinite supply of Asian savings would keep world finance on track.

This month, a series of proverbial earthquakes have shaken all those assumptions with the potential to reshape the political and economic landscape for years to come.

Greg Ip WSJ Jan. 24, 2026

https://www.wsj.com/world/asia/the-first-three-weeks-of-the-year-will-reshape-the-world-e9487b2d