When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stood before the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 20, 2026, he did something no leader of a Western democracy had done before: he admitted the whole thing was a fiction. The rules-based international order, he said, was “partially false” — the strongest exempted themselves when convenient, trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and international law applied “with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” But the fiction was useful, he added. It provided open sea lanes, a stable financial system, and frameworks for resolving disputes. “So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.”
That sign has now been torn down. In a searing essay for Foreign Policy In Focus, Filipino scholar and former congressman Walden Bello argues that Trump has not merely weakened the postwar order — he has replaced it with nothing except the principle that might makes right. And the people paying the highest price, as always, are in the Global South.
Seventy-Eight Days That Changed Everything
The speed of demolition is what distinguishes this moment from earlier erosions. In 78 days — from the seizure of Venezuela’s president on January 2 to the second week of bombing Iran — the United States abducted a sitting head of state, assassinated another, threatened to annex the sovereign territory of a NATO ally, imposed tariffs on 90 countries with little discernible logic, and waged war without UN authorization, congressional approval, or even a coalition of the willing.
Each act built on the last. The Venezuela operation established that the US could frame military abduction as “judicial extraction.” The Iran war established that it could launch a preemptive war based on a presidential “feeling.” Together, they sent a message that the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force against sovereign states — the bedrock rule separating international law from anarchy — was now functionally dead.
Russia’s UN spokesman captured the irony after the Iran strikes began: “We have all lost what we call international law. I don’t even understand how anyone can be called upon to follow the norms and principles of international law. It effectively no longer exists.” As Bello notes, the spokesman was right — except he was off by four years. Russia severed international law’s femoral artery by invading Ukraine in 2022. Trump is now plunging the knife in from the other side.
The South Pays the Tab
Bello’s sharpest insight concerns who bears the cost of this unraveling. Trump’s tariff war hit African nations with some of the most punitive rates on the planet — Lesotho at 50%, Madagascar at 47%, Botswana at 37%. In the case of South Africa, the 30% rate was widely interpreted as punishment for bringing Israel before the International Court of Justice for genocide in Gaza. Forty-four of the 50 least developed countries hit by reciprocal tariffs are in Africa or South Asia.
The abolition of USAID — carried out in Trump’s first weeks alongside Elon Musk — severed a pipeline that, whatever its flaws, funded public health and reproductive health programs across the developing world. A Devex analysis found that at least $72 billion in active foreign assistance was frozen or canceled, affecting programs in 140 countries. Yet Trump and Musk left untouched the International Monetary Fund and World Bank — institutions where Washington holds controlling interest and which continue to impose structural adjustment programs that, as Bello argues, maintain poverty while preaching development.
The Iran war has deepened the damage. The Strait of Hormuz shutdown has driven oil past $100 a barrel, sending shockwaves through economies that import every drop of fuel they consume. The World Food Programme (WFP) warned that fertilizer shipments transiting the Gulf have been disrupted, threatening food production across South Asia and East Africa. Sudan — already enduring the world’s largest humanitarian crisis — now faces 25 additional days of shipping time for aid deliveries rerouted around the Cape of Good Hope.
A Defensive Imperialism
Bello frames Trump’s aggression not as the confident projection of a rising power but as the “fighting retreat” of a declining one. America’s share of global economic output has fallen from 50% in 1945 to roughly 15% today. China has overtaken it as the world’s largest economy by purchasing power. The BRICS bloc — expanded to include Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Egypt, and Ethiopia — now represents over 40% of the world’s population and a growing share of global trade.
The Carnegie Endowment has argued that Trump’s unilateralism is accelerating the very multipolarity he fears. Countries that once tolerated American hegemony because it came packaged with public goods — security guarantees, open trade routes, development assistance — are recalculating. Brazil signed a landmark trade deal with the EU through Mercosur. Canada’s prime minister flew to Beijing seeking alternatives to punitive US tariffs. Gulf states that hosted American bases discovered those bases made them targets rather than sanctuaries.
China sees the opening clearly. While Washington burns through diplomatic capital and military stockpiles in the Middle East, Beijing presents itself as the stable, trade-oriented alternative. Xi Jinping’s government has increased engagement with the Global South through Belt and Road infrastructure lending and positioned the yuan as a potential reserve currency alternative. The dollar’s share of global reserves has already fallen from over 70% to about 57% — and every tariff tantrum, every unilateral war, every threatened annexation pushes it lower.
No Going Back
Bello’s conclusion is bleak but honest: there is no returning to the old order, because the old order was never what it claimed to be. The postwar system delivered prosperity — but disproportionately to the nations that designed it. It promised sovereignty — but enforced it selectively. It enshrined human rights — but looked away when strategic interests demanded it. What Carney called a “useful fiction” was useful mainly for those who wrote the script.
The Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci wrote during the turbulent 1930s that “the old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters.” Bello applies the line to our present. Trump’s regime of unilateralism is monstrous — but it did not emerge from nowhere. It grew from the contradictions of a system that preached equality while practicing hierarchy, that championed free trade while subsidizing its own industries, and that built institutions of collective security while reserving the right to bypass them whenever convenient.
For the Global South, the challenge is not to mourn the old order but to build something better — regional trade agreements that don’t depend on American goodwill, security architectures that don’t require American bases, financial systems that don’t collapse when Washington weaponizes the dollar. Whether that new order arrives in time to prevent more wars, more abductions, and more shattered fictions is the defining question of this decade. The monsters, for now, are in charge.
Original analysis inspired by Walden Bello from Foreign Policy In Focus. Additional research and verification conducted through multiple sources.
By ThinkTanksMonitor
