I attended this conference in Washington and said then that the “America centric” approach doesn’t work. So the headline that “A New American Reconstruction is the World’s Best Hope” would mean, if accepted, that the rest of us have to wait for America to get its act together, and that is our “best hope”.

We don’t have time for that, and while a new and different United States would be welcome globally (depending on what it means exactly), we can’t afford to wait.

Of course what happens in America is crucial, but there is no predicting when and how America will change the destructive path it is on. The rest of us have to deal with the size and extent of the existing rupture between the past and the present, and how we can begin to heal the damage that is taking place.

One of the consequences of the catastrophe is that the notions of “American exceptionalism” and “the one indispensable country” have no progressive connotations for the rest of the world. There is an arrogance to empire that has to go. The headship of a table has to be earned. That has now been squandered, and so the table will be decidedly rounder.

That in turn requires other countries, like Canada, to step up, consistently and effectively, and to demonstrate a willingness to accept a greater global responsibility. The era of assuming the American policy and financial umbrella will do more than enough for the rest of us is over. Donald Trump has made that clear, and the umbrella was getting pretty tattered anyway.

Our collective commitments to global responsibility for security, defence, development, democracy and human rights, the rule of law and multilateralism have to become far more robust to fill the gaps that have now been created. There is no single country that can pull it together. Leaders will emerge based not on speeches, but on what we actually are prepared to do.

Above all, we can’t wait, and America cannot assume that it has a place in our heads and hearts that is guaranteed to last forever. Donald Trump has destroyed that assumption.