At Davos, the world finally started to regain its balance after a year of appeasing Trump

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Better late than never: One year into the second presidency of Donald Trump, the world has reached an inflection point, as Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, made explicit in his speech at an economic summit in Davos. Having tried and failed to appease Trump’s imperialist bullying, middle powers such as his own country must and will instead “act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu." Acting together, Carney said, will take the form of “variable geometries." Countries, whether traditional friends or foes of the United States, may form ad hoc coalitions to pursue specific interests, trade pacts to replace commercial links to the US that Trump has damaged or severed, cooperation in new or existing multilateral forums or even new military alliances.

This reaction to Trumpism is exactly what international-relations theory predicted. In the 1980s, the realist scholar Stephen Walt, nowadays at the Harvard Kennedy School, formulated the ‘balance of threat’ hypothesis of world affairs. It said that states tend to form alliances to counter countries that are simultaneously mighty and hostile.

At the time, Walt’s insight addressed a shortcoming in conventional wisdom, which stipulated that a balance of power was the default tendency in world politics. That theory fit the 19th century, for example. The problem was that it couldn’t explain the Cold War, when one of the superpowers, the United States, attracted rather than repelled many middle and small powers, with no counterbalancing to speak of.