It is too early to be sure, but it seems likely that we have witnessed ‘Peak Trump’. Earlier this month, the president of the United States of America, Donald Trump, arrived at the Davos conference radiating power and menace. Fresh from his attack on Venezuela, he was intent on invading and annexing Greenland and if his European allies in the NATO alliance tried to protect it, he would crush them with tariffs. And he would launch a new rival to the United Nations that would make him World-President-for-Life.

By the time Trump and his retinue landed in a fleet of four military helicopters, however, the wind had changed. Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, had already crystallised the new mood with a remarkable speech that bade a regretful but decisive farewell to the old ‘rules-based’ international order.

What is happening now is a “rupture” with the past, Carney said, and the risk is that we end up with a world solely run by and for the great powers. He proposed instead a shifting coalition of the “middle powers” that would work to contain the more outrageous wishes and whims of the three autocratic great powers: Vladimir Putin’s Russia, Donald Trump’s America, and Xi Jinping’s China.

For all his frankness, Carney did not name the villains, partly because they vary in their villainy. Putin is a tyrant and serial warmonger, but has limited territorial ambitions. Trump is an instinctive autocrat who demands supremacy in the Western Hemisphere but might not permanently erase US democracy. And Xi has not made his mind up yet.

Carney did not get into all this — I am just channelling his inner realist — but it was implicit in the parts he did say out loud. Do not let the bullies win; fear is the mind-killer; stick together and you might even win. At the very least, you will lose less.

And he got a standing ovation at a venue where even a brief round of polite claps is normally a triumph. He was telling the political and economic elites of the world what most of them were already thinking in a less coherent or at least less public way, and overnight the mood changed. Trump already seemed much smaller by the time he flew in the next day.

Right away, he retracted his threat to seize Greenland by force (although the bond markets can take most of the credit for that). Soon he was also cancelling his threat to impose tariffs on NATO members that support Greenland, with only the face-saving pretence of a “framework of a future deal” (content unspecified) as a consolation prize.

But the big humiliation was the launch of his ‘Board of Peace’, a bold bid for symbolic status as ‘King of the World’. It was created to provide a United Nations-like backing for the Trump-brokered ceasefire in the Gaza Strip, but it wound up as a Trump-controlled vehicle to run the UN off the road entirely.

Membership is pay-to-play and permanent membership costs one billion dollars (even more than Mar-a-Lago). Trump is chairman for life, wrote the rules, has veto power, and can terminate any member at will. Gaza is not even mentioned in the ‘charter’. It is a pure vanity project: 62 invitations were sent out and only about 20 countries have signed up.

It is a useful list of those countries that still fear Trump’s wrath, and they are almost all in the Middle East or Central Asia. A few are ideological allies of Trump (for instance, Belarus, Hungary and Argentina), but no major power is a member except the US, and only four members are genuine democracies.

Six months ago, Trump might have pulled off this brazen attempt to hijack the UN, at least for a while. With more time, however, those who once feared him have learned what ‘TACO’ means (Trump Always Chickens Out), and they can see how fast his own power base, the US, is drifting towards chaos and irrelevance under his rule.

Just this month, we have seen his non-overthrow of the Venezuelan regime, his empty promise to stop the massacres in Iran, and his hollow threats to invade Greenland. He remains extremely dangerous to the domestic peace of the US. But the rest of the world is realising that it can just work around the US.

Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Intervention Earth