The first three weeks of the year will reshape the world

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. “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. Though the fog of uncertainty still hangs, here’s my take on what happened and why it matters. Years from now, we may look at President Trump’s declaration from Davos that the U.S.

must acquire Greenland the way previous generations looked at the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. Just as the wall’s collapse symbolized the triumph of the West, Trump’s Greenland grab may come to embody the end of the West as a collection of nations united by values. In the days before Davos, Trump promised to wage trade war against Europe unless he got Greenland, a territory of Denmark, a fellow member of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.

His administration refused to rule out military force. By week’s end he had withdrawn the threats, without formally renouncing the goal. A U.S.

seizure of Greenland would effectively spell the end of NATO. That Trump was prepared to take that risk left international leaders looking at the United States in a new, more fearful light. This is the culmination of a