World order unravelling as Trump pulls at the strings

As the recent military parade and meeting of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) in Beijing demonstrated, the global power structure is unravelling. The magnetic pull of the western alliance is cracking while that of our authoritarian adversaries is intensifying. In the words of the Wall Street Journal’s Yaroslav Trofimov, the image of China’s Xi Jinping, flanked by leaders of fellow nuclear powers Russia and North Korea, as ICBMs rolled through flag-waving crowds in Tiananmen Square, “marked a new phase in the redrawing of the international order.”

The impulsive, increasingly self-absorbed and often contradictory U.S. leadership of western alliances in Europe and Asia contrasts sharply with the newfound solidarity among China, Russia and North Korea. Formerly putative U.S. alli