The funky ambitions of maritime decarbonisation are dead in the water.
Not because of Trump, although Trump has certainly thrown a considerable amount of water onto that particular mill.
No. The more important story is that globalisation has been fraying at the edges for almost a decade.
And that matters enormously for shipping.
When fewer goods move from producing nations to consuming nations, the economics of maritime transport change fundamentally. Competition becomes vicious. Overcapacity becomes vicious. There is simply not enough cargo to keep every ship, every route and every grand expansion plan economically healthy.
The market stops swallowing everything.
It becomes survival of the fittest.
And in a sea full of hungry sharks, lumbering fish do not stand much of a chance.
This is why the collapse of some of the more ambitious maritime decarbonisation fantasies should not be viewed merely through the lens of shipping.
Something considerably larger is happening.
The authority of global institutions is eroding.
The last decade has not exactly been a golden age for the institutions that were supposed to manage the global system. Confidence has been damaged by one failure after another, by controversies over institutional conduct, by organisations taking positions that large parts of their supposed constituency no longer trust, and by the increasingly obvious gap between the rules being proclaimed and the behaviour of those who are expected to follow them.
The central promise of the international order was remarkably simple.
If everyone agrees to play by the same rules, cooperation becomes possible.
But there is a rather serious flaw in that arrangement.
Not everyone plays by the same rules.
Some countries treat international rules as constraints.
Others treat them as weapons.
They use the architecture of the system whenever it advances their interests and ignore it whenever it does not.
And the West has discovered, rather painfully, that a system built on universal compliance does not work particularly well when some of its participants regard compliance as optional.
We spent decades constructing institutions on the assumption that rules themselves could restrain power.
But rules only restrain those who accept that they are binding.
The rest learn how to exploit them.
That is the deeper crisis.
It is not simply that global trade is slowing, or that shipping companies are struggling, or that another ambitious decarbonisation programme is running aground.
It is that the intellectual foundations beneath the global system are being questioned.
The belief that economic interdependence would inevitably produce political convergence has taken a beating.
The belief that international institutions could somehow neutralise great-power competition has taken a beating.
And the belief that the world could be managed through an increasingly elaborate architecture of treaties, conferences, targets and bureaucracies has taken one too.
Perhaps we should stop pretending that this can be repaired by adding another layer of international governance.
Perhaps the more interesting question is whether some of these institutions have simply outlived their usefulness.
Take the United Nations.
The idea behind it was noble enough: provide a forum in which sovereign states could resolve disputes, coordinate action and prevent the return of the great wars that had devastated the twentieth century.
But an institution is not its founding aspiration.
It is what it actually does.
And when an institution becomes incapable of distinguishing between those who genuinely want to preserve the system and those who intend to exploit it, the institution itself becomes part of the problem.
Perhaps it is time to consider the unthinkable.
Not reforming the UN.
Abolishing it.
Because sometimes the most serious reform is not fixing the machine.
It is admitting that the machine no longer works.