Foreign Affairs Minister Anita Anand addresses reporters in Davos, Switzerland, last week. Ms. Anand says the military alliance's focus must also be on the North and the North Atlantic.Sean Kilpatrick/The Canadian Press
The NATO military alliance needs to dedicate more focus to the defence of the Arctic, Canada’s Foreign Minister Anita Anand said, as she invoked Prime Minister Mark Carney’s blunt remarks about the failing rules-based international order.
Ms. Anand, in a speech at the Nordic-Canadian Arctic Symposium in Ottawa on Wednesday, said the debate over the future of Greenland – which U.S. President Donald Trump has said he wants to acquire – has underlined the fact the Arctic is now no longer a low-tension region.
Russia’s Arctic expansion in recent years makes it all the more necessary for NATO to devote more effort to the defence of its northern flank.
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“Now is a moment where we have to recognize that NATO is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and that as such, NATO’s focus must also be on the North and the North Atlantic, and Canada will continue to stress the importance of NATO’s gaze northward as well as eastward,” Ms. Anand said.
The Foreign Minister will travel next week to Copenhagen and then to Greenland to open a new Canadian consulate in Nuuk, as part of an Arctic strategy first unveiled in 2024 before the current tensions over the semi-autonomous Arctic island.
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.
Last week, Mr. Carney, in a provocative speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, delivered what amounted to a veiled criticism of the U.S. President, blaming him for rupturing the international rules-based order.
During the speech, Mr. Carney called for middle powers to “stop pretending” the international order is still functioning and instead build coalitions to survive in a new era where major powers prey on smaller countries to take what they want.
Mr. Carney invoked Czech writer Václav Havel, a dissident who later entered political life, to frame his argument about how middle powers are propping up the lie that the rules-based order still works.
Just as Mr. Havel described Soviet-era shopkeepers placing signs with Communist slogans in their windows to avoid trouble, participating in rituals they knew to be false, Mr. Carney argued that middle powers have similarly gone along with the fiction of a rules-based order that no longer protects them. He said they need to remove the sign in the window.
Ms. Anand said Canada is willing to work with other countries in defence of the Arctic.
“In the Davos speech, the Prime Minister said that Canada will not keep putting the sign in the window, that we will recognize the world for what it is, and in that respect, we will stand up for the sovereignty of our country, as well as the principles of territorial integrity and state sovereignty as foundational principles of international law, and we will do that with like-minded countries,” she said.