Adapting to a new reality
If you haven’t watched Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech to the World Economic Forum from Tuesday, take 17 minutes to watch it while you sip your coffee.
Carney declares in Davos, Switzerland that the rules-based order of the post-war world is over. In fact, it never was. It was a fantasy we all accepted because it served our mutual interests.
A rupture, not a transition
American hegemony “helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.” So we pretended that rules were rules while the hegemons violated them at will and the world looked away:
This bargain no longer works.
Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.
What do we do now, Carney asks, when globalization has led to domination? Aim for greater strategic autonomy or a new model for cooperation? Canada is reevaluating its posture. The reality is that not every trading and alliance partner shares its values. (Looking at you, United States.)
We are calibrating our relationships so their depth reflects our values, and we’re prioritizing broad engagement to maximize our influence, given the fluidity of the world at the moment, the risks that this poses and the stakes for what comes next.
And we are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength.
He outlines Canada’s recent moves. A kind of reset.
We’ve agreed to a comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU, including joining SAFE, the European defence procurement arrangements. We have signed 12 other trade and security deals on four continents in six months.
In the past few days, we’ve concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar. We’re negotiating free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines and Mercosur.
We’re doing something else: to help solve global problems, we’re pursuing variable geometry. In other words, different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests. So on Ukraine, we’re a core member of the Coalition of the Willing and one of the largest per capita contributors to its defence and security.
On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland’s future.
Our commitment to NATO’s Article 5 is unwavering, so we’re working with our NATO allies, including the Nordic-Baltic Eight, to further secure the alliance’s northern and western flanks, including through Canada’s unprecedented investments in over-the-horizon radar, in submarines, in aircraft, and boots on the ground — boots on the ice.
Canada strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland and calls for focused talks to achieve our shared objectives of security and prosperity in the Arctic.
Carney does not mention Donald Trump or the United States by name in reference to tariffs or to Greenland, but his message is clear. The U.S. can no longer be trusted as guarantor of order and stability. The “middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”
The cooks in this analogy are the United States, Russia, and China. And for Canada, primarily the U.S.
In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in-between have a choice: compete with each other for favour, or combine to create a third path with impact. We shouldn’t allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity, and rules will remain strong if we choose to wield it together.
It’s a brave new world for the “middle powers,” with no going back. The nations in Davos must acknowledge the fantasy and face the new reality realistically, Carney argues. Whether the rest of the EU accepts Carney’s assessment that
The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home, and to act together.
Likely there are quiet planning meetings happening in Davos as states in attendance recognize that the United States they once admired and respected falls into fascism with imperialist designs.
Here on this continent (with Canada and Mexico), Americans have to sort out whether we will allow a madman to demand that the western world accede to his demands for obeisance lest he throw over the game board. That is, if there are enough of us with the right stuff to fight back against Trump and his gang of thieves.
We too have operated under a comfortable fiction that America’s stability over the years was built on our constitution, our laws, and our democratic traditions. Trumpism ripped that veil away to reveal how much the entire edifice of Exceptionalism was built on “norms.” It was only a gentleman’s agreement that our leaders behave like gentlemen, until the country fell for a con man and cult leader. Not once, but twice. Trumpism ripped the masks off neighbors who wave American flags, boast of their real Americanness, and loudly profess faith in Jesus, not Christianity as a system of values but as an authoritarian agenda. It was so much vapid branding.
“America isn’t the way it is because [Trump is] president. He’s president because America is the way it is,” as Canadian journalist David Cochrane explained two weeks ago. He seems to have anticipated Carney’s Davos speech.
The American challenge going forward is to examine our weaknesses, acknowledge them honestly, and adapt. There is no going back. Norms have failed us. We have failed ourselves. Barbarians are not at the gate. They are in the Oval Office and in the streets of Minneapolis. They are staged to invade Greenland.
Canada has figured it out. Americans seem the last to know.