Prime Minister Mark Carney delivers a speech during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos on Jan. 20.FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images
Mark Carney’s speech in Davos last month has made a bigger splash than any pronouncement by a Canadian prime minister in years.
Not since Brian Mulroney clashed with Margaret Thatcher over South African apartheid has something a PM said been so remarked on in other parts of the world. I happen to be visiting Australia right now and the speech has been all over the media. There must have been dozens of articles and columns analyzing his remarks. Most of them praised him for his intelligence and rigour.
I think there are a few reasons why the speech had such an impact. To begin with, it was unusually well written. Mr. Carney cited Vaclav Havel and Thucydides to make his points. That was a refreshing exception to the usual pablum you get from world leaders at gab fests such as Davos.
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Second, his defiant tone struck a chord at a time when the mad king who occupies the White House was at his maddest. Donald Trump was threatening to take over Greenland. Appalled European countries were sending small contingents of soldiers there to express their opposition to this insane idea, which would have torn the NATO alliance asunder. (Mr. Trump has since backed off a little – for now.)
Mr. Carney asked the world’s nations to show some backbone. At a time when big powers are displaying their dominance, he said, “there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety. Well, it won’t.”
Second, Mr. Carney seemed to be speaking frankly about the state of the world. The PM announced “a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality.” He said the whole international rules-based order was “partially false” because great powers would simply ignore those rules when they wanted.
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But was he, ultimately, right in his analysis of the international situation? There are strong reasons to think not.
The thrust of the speech was that the old world of alliances and treaties and rules is essentially over – as, by extension, is the world in which the United States (often inconsistently) enforces that system.
Is that really true? Despite Mr. Trump, NATO has risen to the challenge from Russia, spending hundreds of millions of dollars to arm Ukraine and backing Volodymyr Zelensky to the hilt. With the addition of Finland and Sweden to its ranks, the world’s most successful military alliance is stronger than ever.
The European Union remains united and intact as an economic and political bloc. The volume of global trade was actually up last year, reaching record levels even as Mr. Trump waved his tariff club around like a cave man.
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So it is a bit early to give up on the rules-based order. Of course, the Trump madness has been enormously disruptive. But a permanent “rupture?” Unclear. If he does not organize a coup of some kind (nothing is impossible) Mr. Trump will leave office in two years and 11 months, a blink in time. The American system might well right itself and Washington resume its role in backing the world order, even if not with the same commitment as before.
A truly far-sighted leader would be looking ahead to that day. Instead, Mr. Carney has been trotting around the world shaking hands with the leaders of Qatar (sponsors of Hamas) and China (whose President is carrying out a purge of his generals worthy of Stalin).
A whole series of Canadian prime ministers have tried to diversify this country’s trade. Witness the dozens of trade missions to Beijing, Seoul, Delhi and other capitals over recent decades. Nothing wrong with that, in principle. But two-thirds of our exports still go to the U.S. Our whole economy is intertwined with our giant neighbour’s. That is unlikely to change much.
Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a speech at the World Economic Forum that blamed U.S. President Donald Trump, without naming him, for what Carney described as a rupture in global relations.
A truly realistic approach would be to accept it and try to manage the U.S. relationship as calmly as possible in the current ridiculous situation.
“We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it,” Mr. Carney said.
Of course we should. That system of open trade, strong alliances and reliable dispute-settling institutions has been a key to the prosperity and security of Canada, a nation that depends on trade and is not able to defend itself on its own. The United States has been the pillar of the whole thing.
Mr. Carney suggests it was all a sham, rigged to benefit the mighty. As eloquent as he was in Davis, that was the wrong message to send.