A wily former British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, famously said that “a week is a long time in politics.”

If anything, he was guilty of understatement.

In the last week alone, US President Donald Trump’s remarks about owning Greenland, European weakness, and his scorn about NATO members’ contributions in Afghanistan have laid bare the stark reality that the old order is dead – and it won’t be resurrected.

Add in a Board of Peace for Gaza that includes the president of Belarus and an invitation sent to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and it’s been a strange week.

No one captured the mood better than Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, whose speech at the World Economic Forum at Davos on Wednesday infuriated Trump.

“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” Carney said – issuing a rallying call to what he called “middle powers.”

“If you are not at the table, you are on the menu,” he said.

There are signs of a realization in the West now that candid resistance is a better approach than quiet accommodation. Besides the outrage over Trump’s remarks on Afghanistan, the Europeans were similarly aghast, and said so, by Trump’s threat that eight European nations would be punished with tariffs for supporting the current state of Greenland as part of Denmark.

Europe threatened retaliatory tariffs. The European Parliament responded by putting the EU-US trade deal on ice.

The United Kingdom, France, Germany and Italy all rejected invitations to join Trump’s Board of Peace, not wishing to be subordinate to him as the chairman.

“I obviously have concerns about Putin being on a Board of Peace,” UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said, after Trump declared the Russian leader had agreed to join. Moscow has not confirmed that.

By Wednesday, Trump had withdrawn the threat of tariffs and moderated his rhetoric about a military takeover of Greenland.

“We were successful in withstanding, being non-escalatory, but also by standing firm,” said Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission.

Then came the harder bit.

“We know we have to work more and more for an independent Europe,” she added.

Belgium’s Prime Minister Bart De Wever was more explicit.

“We were dependent on the United States, so we chose to be lenient, but now so many red lines are being crossed that you have the choice between your self-respect,” he said.

“If you back down now, you’re going to lose your dignity, and that’s probably the most precious thing you can have in a democracy is your dignity.”

If Europe has learned anything, it’s that it is likely weeks (or less) away from the next bout of transatlantic melodrama, whether it’s Greenland again, Ukraine, tariffs or another area that becomes Trump’s focus.

“The immediate threat was paused, and the military option is now off the table. Until it is back,” said Grégoire Roos, director of Europe and Russia programs at Chatham House.

Roos argues that the real threat to Europe is US economic dominance, exemplified by European reliance on imports of American natural gas.

“The EU remains structurally exposed to pressure from its closest ally – and that US pressure may be applied in many ways without crossing the threshold of force,” he wrote last week.

Whether the Europeans will show unity and urgency in response to this rollercoaster is another matter.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, also in Switzerland last week, said that so far it had not done so.

Referencing the film “Groundhog Day,” Zelensky said, “Just last year, here in Davos, I ended my speech with the words: “Europe needs to know how to defend itself. A year has passed – and nothing has changed.”

Not entirely true. As military analyst Mick Ryan, also an adjunct fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, wrote on his blog Futura Doctrina, “Europe has changed significantly over the course of the war, and has increased its military, economic and intelligence support to Ukraine.”

The European Union has built a formidable fund for Ukraine to buy weapons, extended billions in credits, and scaled up its own military production, albeit from a very low base.

But the EU’s decision-making is cumbersome: on issues of defense and security, getting 27 governments on board is like chasing a squirrel around the garden.

Europe “still cares for the values the old order aspired to, at least in name,” wrote commentator Martin Sandbu in the Financial Times this weekend.

“It embodies the order in how its members share their sovereignty. But it will never serve as such a global anchor until it takes seriously the effort that this would entail,” Sandbu argued.

A 400-page blueprint already exists. Two years ago, Mario Draghi, a former Italian prime minister and like Carney a former central bank chief, penned a report laying out Europe’s challenge: massive investment in joint military capabilities, more nimble decision-making and better exploitation of innovation.

Pointing out that Europe’s workforce was projected to decline by 2 million a year by 2040, Draghi warned that “geopolitical stability is waning, and our dependencies have turned out to be vulnerabilities.”

Carney took Draghi’s assessment one step further, warning that the old rules-based order was crumbling before “intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.”

“Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just,” the Canadian prime minister said at the end of his Davos speech, which drew a standing ovation.

De Wever, the Belgian prime minister, said the transition could be dangerous, recalling the words of Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci: “If the old is dying and the new is not yet born, then you live in a time of monsters.”

“It’s up to (Trump) to decide if he wants to be a monster – yes or no,” De Wever said.