“You aren’t going to like what comes after America,” the great bard Leonard Cohen famously wrote. Perhaps he is being proved right — at least this is not the America we thought we knew. (“I’ve seen the future,” Cohen also sang, “it is murder.”) Guessing the endgame of President Donald Trump’s policies is a fool’s errand. But it would be a fool, too, who didn’t try to prepare for a world from which the US has withdrawn — economically, militarily and diplomatically. So here in Free Lunch, I want to start an occasional series of pieces on how the world, and in particular (the rest of) the liberal democratic west, might cope with a US-sized hole in its heart. Send me your thoughts at freelunch@ft.com. My thoughts today are about international governance — where I bring, I hope, some good news, at any rate better than what Cohen would have us fear. The Maga modus operandi in international affairs is now familiar. The polite word for it is bilateralism. More harshly, it’s divide and rule everywhere, and bully weaker countries into fealty when you can. Conversely, it’s not a surprise that Trump scorns the multilateralism of a rules-based order, where big countries give up the freedom to take unfettered advantage of their greater power, for the sake of a structure that ties everyone in. This goes far beyond cutting foreign aid. Trump, in his first presidential term, famously withdrew from the Paris treaty against climate change and the multi-power agreement to prevent Iran from going nuclear. This time around, he has withdrawn from the Paris treaty a second time (Joe Biden brought the US back in), as well as the World Health Organization. Trump’s US is also disengaging from several entities of the UN (UNRWA, Unesco and the UNHRC). That’s not all: Washington is also deploying sanctions policy to frustrate the actions of the International Criminal Court, snubbing the G20 and being uncooperative in the G7.