In January 2026, two “death sentences” for the global order were issued in rapid succession. The first was delivered by U.S. President Donald Trump during an interview with The New York Times, where he dropped this bombshell: “I don’t need international law. The only thing that stops me is my own sense of morality.” The second came from a man long considered the honor student of liberal internationalism — Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. On January 20 at Davos, he stated quietly but firmly: “The rules-based international order is finished. Nostalgia is not a strategy.” Liberal legal scholars and the media are lamenting the arrival of a “lawless era.” But their grief is exactly what Prime Minister Carney calls “living within a lie.” The world has not become lawless. Rather, the modern “Law of Nations” — the fiction of sovereign equality based on the UN Charter — has collapsed. In its place, we have returned to a much older, colder code: The Law of Great Kings.