In the headlines

Donald Trump unveiled his “Board of Peace” at the World Economic Forum in Davos this morning. Twenty-four countries have signed up to the US president’s would-be rival to the UN, including Hungary, Turkey and several Gulf states. Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper says the UK isn’t yet ready to join because of concerns about Vladimir Putin’s possible involvement. Trump stayed tight-lipped about the “framework for a future deal” on Greenland announced yesterday. The US president dropped his tariff threats after speaking to Nato chief Mark Rutte, reportedly on topics including the renegotiation of a pact governing the stationing of US troops in Greenland and how to increase US investments in the semi-autonomous Danish territory. UK government borrowing fell sharply to a lower-than-expected £11.6bn in December, thanks to rising tax revenues. According to the Office for National Statistics, the deficit was 38% lower than in the same month a year earlier. Economist Ruth Gregory tells the FT the public finances are “finally showing signs of improvement”.

Beware a declining superpower

Seventy years ago, says Janan Ganesh in the FT, Britain and France tried to take the Suez Canal by force. Neither was led by an obvious jingo, but as these two declining powers showed, “status anxiety makes sensible people do rash things”. America’s decline is not as sharp as theirs back then – it remains the strongest country on Earth, just by a reduced margin – but in a sense its fall is worse. Britain could console itself that it was handing the world over to a “democratic, anglophone and mostly white superpower”. America has lost ground to China, with which it shares nothing. So the experience of decline, though less steep, might be more harrowing. Add to this Donald Trump’s personal obsession with status, and you get the mistreatment of Greenland, the gunboat diplomacy in the Caribbean and other “Suez-style” attempts to recover lost prestige.

The truth is that even under a “normal” president, the US might be “behaving badly around about now”. It is a rare superpower that takes decline well. And America was already chafing at the “rules-based international order” back when George W Bush was in office: think not just of Iraq, but of his “extreme disregard” for the International Criminal Court. (The latter is no complaint against him – he was right to mistrust left-wing “global flummery”.) For those who doubt America’s decline – pointing, perhaps, to its extraordinary economic and technological gains in recent decades – consider the limited effectiveness of US sanctions in recent years, the inability to maintain a lead in AI, and the winnowing of its military supremacy over China. Forget Trump. Under these circumstances, “even a garden variety Republican president would be lashing out”.

Ignore the old Thucydides line that “the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must”. The US was at its mightiest in 1946, when it made half the manufactured goods in the world and held a nuclear monopoly. What did Washington do with all this power? Set up the Marshall Plan and Nato, and rebuilt Germany and Japan as pacifist democracies. The belligerent turn in American behaviour has come during its relative decline.

At the beginning of the year, The New York Times published a list of 52 places to go in 2026. In a useful sorting exercise, tens of thousands of readers have since clicked “save” on their favourites, which include the tiny, hardly touched Caribbean island of Saba; the unspoilt tavernas and crystal-clear Ionian waters of Messinia in Greece; the white sand beaches and painstakingly reconstructed 13th-century Shuri Castle in Okinawa, Japan; the Træna archipelago off the coast of Norway, with its midnight sun; the lushly biodiverse Osa Peninsula in Costa Rica, home to a population of sloths; and a train through the Canadian Rockies. To see the full list, click the image.

Rachel Reeves has finally had a sensible idea, says James Moore in The Independent. At the World Economic Forum in Davos, the chancellor announced plans to reimburse certain visa fees and create “fast-track processing” for international companies wanting to expand into the UK – meaning top firms will be able to bring in hotshot coders from, say, India without all the grief this currently puts on their HR departments. It’s frequently lost in our increasingly toxic debate about immigration that the ability to “hustle in talent” matters. If Reeves and the Home Office can make this work, it would be a “thoroughly good thing”.

On this day in 2017, a pleasingly sozzled Rod Stewart gave a memorable performance helping announce the Scottish Cup draw on live TV. To watch the full video in all its glory – and we really think you should, it’s bliss – click here.

Brooklyn Beckham’s diatribe against his parents this week really “smacks of entitlement”, says Sarah Vine in the Daily Mail. Whatever you think of David and Victoria, they’ve worked extraordinarily hard to build the “brand” so derided by their eldest son – and it’s that hard work that has allowed Brooklyn to enjoy the many great advantages he has had in life. The ungrateful nepo baby claims he has found “peace and relief” with his billionaire heiress wife, Nicola Peltz, but genuinely happy people don’t inflict pain on their own family. And spare me the guff about breaking free from a lifetime’s “enslavement” to his parents’ social media accounts – Nicola’s Instagram (3.4 million followers) is an unending stream of selfies. He has merely swapped one image-obsessed family for another.

This is what happens when you trade your family’s privacy for money, says Marina Hyde in The Guardian. The Beckhams have been commodifying Brooklyn “since he was a foetus”, selling the papers the story of Victoria’s pregnancy, the first pictures of him after his birth, and intimate photoshoots of their home and nursery. This, remember, is a couple who stayed up until 3am on their wedding night deciding which photos would feature in OK! magazine. Then social media came along, and they “channeled their business through its pipes”, never grasping how “weird and potentially corrosive” all this commodification is. The sad thing is, they’re not alone. Billions of ordinary people are doing the same, sucked into Big Tech’s lie that “being connected” online is more important than privacy. If the UK government does ban social media for under-16s, perhaps they should also forbid parents from plastering their kids all over these platforms from the day they’re born. Not to interrupt Brooklyn’s brief moment in the spotlight, but he is “the least of it”.

Four Nasa astronauts will soon venture “further into space than ever before”, says Kaya Burgess in The Times. In early February, weather permitting, NASA’s Artemis II crew will blast off from the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida on a 10-day mission to orbit the moon. The team will spend – or endure – the 257,061-mile journey there and back in the Orion spacecraft, which is the size of a Ford transit van and fitted with only the bare essentials: a water dispenser, a food warmer and a waste management system (urine is vented out; solid waste is collected). If all goes well, Artemis III will attempt the first moon landing since 1972 “as early as mid-2027”.

Quirk of history

There’s a clear model for what Donald Trump should do with Greenland, says Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post: the US naval base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The lease agreement for the site was first agreed in February 1903 under President Theodore Roosevelt, and updated in 1934 so that it would continue in perpetuity. Cuba retains its sovereignty over the rest of the island, and despite the rise of a hostile communist dictatorship that would love nothing more than to boot the Americans out, the agreement remains in place. Rather than owning all of Greenland, the US should just “lease the parts it needs”.

Snapshot answer

It’s the Japanese tennis player Naomi Osaka, who wore a curious, “jellyfish-inspired” outfit to walk to the court for her first round match at the Australian Open, says Ellie Violet Bramley in The Guardian. The 28-year-old wore a miniskirt over very wide-legged trousers and a wide-brimmed hat with a veil, and carried a parasol. Some jellyfish-esque elements were also incorporated into her on-court outfit, which featured a watery turquoise and green palette and soft frills on the warm-up jacket and dress, alluding to tentacles. Thankfully, after all that, she won.