A Caesar in the White House
The old world order is dead because Western universalists destroyed it.
By Melanie Phillips
JNS
Jan 22, 2026
This was the week when much of the West woke up to the realization that the old world order was dead. A new one was being born, and they didn’t like it at all. And it’s far from clear that Israel can rest easy either.
The Trump administration came to the World Economic Forum in Davos—the very belly of the liberal universalist beast—to tell the rest of the West that globalization was dead. It had failed Europe and the United States, harmed their prosperity and growth, and made them dependent upon and even subservient to others, including their enemies.
The world leaders forced to listen to this lecture were still reeling from U.S. President Donald Trump’s threat to take over Greenland and punish countries that objected. At Davos, he retreated from that into a framework deal with NATO’s head Mark Rutte over Arctic security, which sounds long overdue for the defense of the free world.
Remarkably, no less committed a universalist than Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney told forum participants that the game was now up for the global order. Many countries were now concluding that they must develop greater strategic autonomy. “When the rules no longer protect you,” he said, “you must protect yourself.”
You don’t say. Better the sinner who repenteth, etc.? Not quite.
Carney and other liberal leaders lamenting the end of the globalist game are merely acknowledging that Washington will no longer tolerate it. They fail to admit, however, that they have been propping up an international order that promised liberal ideals but delivered the opposite.
These are the leaders who continue to develop economic ties with China, one of the principal threats to freedom and security in the world.
These are the leaders who, for more than four decades, appeased the fanatical Islamic regime in Iran as it exported terrorism and mass murder around the world, pursued the development of nuclear weapons, waged proxy war against Israel and oppressed its own people. Over the past few weeks, as at least 16,500 Iranians were murdered in their attempt to bring the regime down, these world leaders said virtually nothing and did even less.
Even now, France Spain and Italy are actually blocking the designation of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—the main instrument of the regime’s global aggression—as a terrorist organization.
The leaders in Davos have continued to allow Russia to launder its ill-gotten money through their capitals and have done little more than wring their hands over Ukraine.
They say they don’t like bullying leaders like Trump. But these countries have themselves relentlessly bullied Israel at its time of maximum need.
They have punished it for defending itself against genocide, promoted Hamas lies as truths, and incentivized the Palestinian Arabs in their aim of exterminating Israel by continuing to fund the Palestinian Authority’s rewards for terrorist attacks and the indoctrination of its children in murderous hatred of Jews.
So their hypocrisy in throwing up their hands in horror at what America has become is epic. But Trump’s new world order should also cause more than a few qualms.
He has invited to join his Board of Peace—the body that supposedly will usher in a new era of peace and prosperity in Gaza—none other than Qatar and Turkey. Yet these two countries are mortal enemies of Israel, the Jews and the West.
As Khaled Abu Toameh has written on Gatestone, both countries don’t believe in any peace process between Israel and the Muslim world, and they continue to embrace and sponsor Islamists who support Islamist terrorists.
The International Union of Muslim Scholars, which describes Qatar and Turkey as its biggest backers, issued a fatwa last year obliging the Islamic world to wage jihadi holy war “against the Zionist entity and all those who participate with it,” urging the formation of a unified Islamic military alliance.
Earlier this month, it issued another fatwa that affirmed “the prohibition of normalization with the Zionist enemy [Israel] in all its forms.”
What has happened in Syria is no less alarming. Trump has fawned over Syria’s new president, the former Al-Qaeda and ISIS commander Ahmed al-Sharaa, as “tough” and “handsome,” and has treated him as a reformed character with a valuable part to play in a new peaceful Middle East.
Yet over the past few weeks, al-Sharaa’s forces, backed by Turkey, have been slaughtering the Kurds, America’s invaluable allies—whom it has now betrayed.
Earlier this week, Tom Barrack, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey, said of the Kurds’ militia, the Syrian Democratic Forces: “The original purpose of the SDF as the primary anti-ISIS force on the ground has largely expired. Damascus is now both willing and positioned to take over security responsibilities, including control of ISIS detention facilities.”
The result, appallingly, has been that the ISIS prisoners being guarded by the Kurds were left in limbo. Some of them promptly walked free, forcing U.S. Central Command to step in the next day to transfer such prisoners to Iraq and out of the Syrian regime’s hands.
Al-Sharaa has previously slaughtered Syria’s Druze, Christians and Alawites. Given half a chance, he will next turn his guns against Israel.
If anyone wonders how on earth an American administration can be so woefully ignorant of the implacable nature of Islamist fanaticism, just listen to the shocking inanities of Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff. He said at Davos: “Iran needs to change its ways … if they indicate that they’re willing to do that, I think we can diplomatically settle this.”
So even now, the Trump administration seems to believe that the Islamist fanatics in Tehran are reasonable people who will choose pragmatism over what they believe is their God-given duty to destroy Israel and the West.
But then Witkoff previously assured the world that the 800 protesters taken prisoner by Tehran and threatened with execution would be spared. If the regime hadn’t already started murdering them before he spoke, it has been doing so ever since.
Witkoff has also said that Hamas was not “ideologically intractable” and that the rulers of Qatar had renounced their radicalism and were now “our allies.”
It is simply astounding that such a man can be the “special envoy” for the president of the United States—and at such a deeply perilous time for the world.
More than two weeks ago, Trump told the heroic Iranian demonstrators that “help is on its way.” That help hasn’t yet arrived, and thousands have been murdered and tortured. The American military build-up in the region suggests that the United States will either strike Iran or is preparing for an Iranian strike. But who knows?
Opinion today is divided between those asserting that Trump is saving the world and those asserting that Trump is destroying the world.
The reality is that he’s not a fascist, racist or madman; he is rather a self-styled emperor. He demands fealty, is driven by transactionalism, narcissism and revenge, and gets his way through the exercise of raw power.
This is hardly desirable. Still, Trump is motivated by love of America, Western civilization and the Jewish people. His political opponents, on the other hand, are motivated by hatred of America, Western civilization and the Jewish people—or are chillingly indifferent to those who do.
There’s surely no contest.
Trump’s new world order has emerged because the old one has so catastrophically failed. International law and transnational institutions were created to destroy the power of imperial overreach in the interests of peace, freedom and justice. But that international order has betrayed and abandoned peace, freedom and justice. The outcome is a Caesar in the White House.
Trump is the best friend Israel has ever had in the Oval Office. That doesn’t make him perfect. He can be the Jews’ best shot and can do some brilliant things, and yet at the same time be a flawed individual. Those flaws may sometimes prevent him from doing the right thing and lead him instead into making terrible errors.
We must all just hold our breath.
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