I Spent Decades Working with American Officials. The Country I Knew Is Gone

For much of my career, the stability of the global economic system depended on decisions taken in Washington, DC—and on whether those decisions were bound by rules or by discretion.

Working with American officials for decades, across multiple administrations and institutions, my years living in Washington were part of that experience. In moments of real pressure, I saw first-hand the seriousness with which many approached power—particularly the understanding that power must be constrained if it is to be legitimate and durable.

That understanding mattered, and it shaped outcomes.

I was in the United States Treasury Building for the final meetings on the Canada–US Free Trade Agreement. The negotiations were on the brink of collapse. Canada was not prepared to accept a deal without binding judicial review of trade decisions, having seen how easily US agencies could disregard obligations when domestic politics intervened. As the clock approached midnight on the final day, we had largely resigned ourselves to failure.

Moments later, then treasury secretary James Baker informed us that Ronald Reagan, US president at the time, had agreed to independent judicial review—to bind the United States to the rule of law rather than to political discretion. The agreement was struck.

That decision did not weaken American power—it legitimized it. It signalled that the United States was willing to bind itself in order to lead. That was the America many of us worked with. And that is the legacy now being dismantled.

Recent US trade decisions—including sweeping tariffs imposed even after the Supreme Court curbed certain emergency levies—show how the United States is moving away from rule-bound leadership toward unilateral economic measures.

The disagreement at the heart of today’s debate is not emotional but analytical. Power and leadership are not the same thing. American power was always the underlying reality—through economic scale, military reach, and financial dominance. Leadership offered the choice to channel that power through rules, institutions, and shared decision making rather than through unilateral discretion. Rules were not a constraint on power; they were how power became credible.

Institutions such as the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, and, later, the Group of Twenty were imperfect by design. Their purpose was not to equalize influence but to make asymmetry workable—to embed power in processes that others could rely on even when outcomes were unequal.

That choice paid dividends. It reduced volatility, limited escalation, and encouraged adaptation rather than resistance. Power alone can compel compliance, but leadership creates predictability. And predictability is what allows co-operation to endure under stress.

Today, what has changed is not a normal disagreement among former allies. It is an erosion.

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Prime Minister Mark Carney, in a January 2026 speech, described the current moment as a rupture—a break in the continuity of rules, expectations, and restraints that made co-operation possible. Rupture is not abstract—it has concrete consequences.

When trade rules become conditional, disputes escalate rather than resolve. Retaliation replaces adjudication, and economic conflict becomes harder to contain. When financial coordination weakens, shocks travel faster and farther, and crisis response becomes fragmented rather than collective. When commitments are treated as provisional, climate coordination stalls—not because countries disagree on goals, but because no one is confident that others will act.

In each case, the problem is not bad faith but uncertainty. When rules no longer anchor expectations, every actor hedges. Risk premiums rise, co-operation narrows, and stability becomes episodic rather than systemic.

This is the real cost of rupture: not the loss of influence in any single negotiation but the steady decay of the environment in which co-operation is possible at all.

There is also an internal dimension to this erosion. Systems that struggle to deliver basic security and predictability to their own citizens find it harder to sustain consistent, credible action abroad—not because of hypocrisy but because dysfunction constrains capacity.

Governments absorbed by internal volatility have less bandwidth for sustained international engagement. Policy becomes reactive. Commitments become fragile. Allies notice and so do rivals.

This is not a moral judgment—it is a functional one. Durable leadership abroad rests on institutional coherence at home.

A similar pattern is evident in the security realm: recent Middle East operations have been justified as exceptional prerogatives, pursued with minimal consultation and on the assumption that allies and markets will absorb the cost.

The United States often frames its actions through the idea of American exceptionalism—the belief that it is inherently different and, often, exempt from the constraints that apply to others. At its best, this belief functioned as a discipline—a claim that the United States would hold itself to a higher standard.

Increasingly, it operates in the opposite direction. Exceptionalism now inhibits institutional learning. It makes comparison politically toxic, and course correction appears as weakness rather than adaptation. When systems underperform, the response is not reform but denial. Leadership requires the ability to adjust. Systems that cannot learn cannot lead.

We have passed a watershed moment, and American primacy will not return. Structural shifts in economic weight, demographics, and domestic political constraints make that clear, regardless of electoral outcomes.

The challenge now is shared. The rest of the world must adjust to a less dominant United States, and the United States must adjust to exercising influence without assuming deference. Leadership in such a system will be more distributed, more negotiated, and more fragile—but still necessary if instability is to be contained.

The question is no longer whether American primacy will continue—it will not. The question is whether enough countries, including the United States, will recognize that in a multipolar world, the alternative to rules is not freedom of action but permanent instability.

Reprinted, with permission, from the Centre for International Governance Innovation.