Can Carney be the Trump whisperer for a while?

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It’s a measure of the cohesiveness of the Western world that France’s President, Emmanuel Macron, stopped in Greenland on his way to the G7 summit, in a symbolic statement to Donald Trump to keep his hands off European territory.

Since he moved back into the White House, the U.S. President has repeatedly talked about taking over Greenland, an autonomous Danish territory, declining to rule out taking it by force.

“That is not what is done between allies,” Mr. Macron said during a brief stop to Greenland on Sunday.

That used to be taken for granted. But Canadians have heard Mr. Trump suggest Canada will become the 51st state and they know he thinks differently from other U.S. presidents. Now, the President of France feels he has to plant the flag of the European Union in Greenland.

It’s also notable because once, in the early days of Mr. Trump’s first term, there was a feeling that Mr. Macron was one of the few leaders who could talk to him and exert a little influence. A Trump whisperer. Another was a guy named Justin Trudeau. That sure didn’t last.

Now, Prime Minister Mark Carney seems to be one of the few who have a relationship with Mr. Trump. The U.S. President has called the Canadian leader a “very nice gentleman,” and the two got along at a White House meeting last month. They have kept talking, and texting, since.

How will Mr. Carney, the G7 summit’s host, handle Mr. Trump now?

The two are set to meet Monday morning in a face-to-face that presumably will focus primarily on bilateral issues of tariffs, trade and security.

But at the summit in Kananaskis, Alta., the Prime Minister also has to manage the talks in the hopes there will be no sharp rifts. Then there’s the off-the-agenda efforts that G7 leaders will make to influence Mr. Trump. They’d like him to stop taxing trade, to support Ukraine and, if they had their druthers, to stop talking about taking Greenland.

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“It’s going to be a consummate test of Mark Carney’s mediation and negotiation skills,” said Carleton University international affairs professor Fen Hampson. “Is he going to show that he is the Trump handler?”

That matters to Canada-U.S. bilateral relations. It might also matter to Mr. Carney’s efforts to build stronger relations with other leaders.

But it won’t be the kind of relationship U.S. presidents used to have with Canadian prime ministers or G7 leaders. Mr. Trump just doesn’t see any foreign leaders, or their countries, that way.

Mr. Trump’s postwar predecessors wouldn’t have mused aloud about Canada becoming the 51st state. They wouldn’t have refused to rule out invading Greenland, either.

Things have changed, sure. The opening of Arctic shipping lanes and China’s domination of supplies of rare earths have increased Greenland’s strategic importance.

But Mr. Trump’s predecessors would have looked at the territory of a staunch NATO ally, which houses a U.S. military base and would be willing to trade minerals, and decided the U.S. didn’t need to own the territory, let alone invade.

This president doesn’t look at allies and friends as being on the same team. There is no “us.”

If Mr. Carney keeps the warm relationship with Mr. Trump, it could be important, for a while. It might help the two countries negotiate a bilateral deal.

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Perhaps Mr. Trump might even be persuaded to accept some part of Mr. Carney’s argument that integrated cross-border industries, such as autos, help the U.S. compete against Chinese competition.

Certainly, other G7 leaders could benefit from someone who can handle Mr. Trump even a little. In Kananaskis, they would surely like to convince him to urge de-escalation in Israel’s conflict with Iran. They’d like to influence him to be supportive of Ukraine. They don’t want to set him off to do the opposite.

That is a real test for Mr. Carney. But even if he succeeds as a Trump whisperer now, it’s not likely to last.

There’s going to be the moment when Mr. Trump doesn’t get what he wants from Mr. Carney. Or when Canada’s Prime Minister says something Mr. Trump takes as a slight – as Mr. Trudeau did when he made the relatively mild assertion that Canadians are polite but won’t be pushed around. The U.S. President is famous for hair-trigger volatility.

At a more basic level, Mr. Trump won’t ever see foreign leaders as allies in the way his predecessors did. There’s no group for him. There’s the U.S., Mr. Trump’s U.S., and everyone else is never us, but always them.