Donald Trump, beware – this is what a global liberal fightback looks like | Timothy Garton Ash

From the Canadian elections to universities and civil society, the campaign to turn the tide against anti-liberal nationalists is at last underway

Liberals of all countries, unite! Just as anti-liberal powers outside the west are becoming stronger than ever, the assault on everything we stand for has been joined by the United States. Against this massed onslaught of anti-liberal nationalists we need a determined fightback of liberal internationalists. Canada's election this week can contribute a strong mounted brigade.

A core insight of liberalism is that, if people are to live together well in conditions of freedom, power always needs to be dispersed, cross-examined and controlled. Faced with the raw, bullying assertion of might, whether from Washington, Moscow or Beijing, we now have to create countervailing concentrations of power. In the long history of liberalism, a free press, the law, labour unions, a business community kept separate from political power, NGOs, truth-seeking institutions such as universities, civil resistance, multilateral organisations and international alliances have all served - alongside multiparty politics and regular free and fair elections - to constrain the men who would be kings.

Timothy Garton Ash is a historian, political writer and Guardian columnist