For a moment, Mark Carney made it look so easy. When the Canadian prime minister stood up at Davos on 20 January, he delivered a platitude-busting speech that dismantled the “fiction” that has underpinned the rules-based international order for decades – and offered a vision for how to escape Donald Trump.
Invoking the Czech dissident-turned-president Václav Havel’s essay “The Power of the Powerless”, Carney likened Soviet-era communism to the dominance of the liberal order of today – an order everyone has always known “was partially false”. We always knew, for example, “that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful.”
Without naming Trump, Carney spoke of the “rupture” taking place, where the bargains once made under US hegemony have become too costly for Canada and other “middle powers” who now find themselves the victims of the world’s economic integration – a system they helped build. “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration,” he said, “when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”
Carney is not, of course, the first person to point out the problems with Pax Americana or the hypocrisy in Western leaders. (If you’ve spoken to someone on the left in the past 50 years or so, you’ll have heard the seeds of this argument.) But at a time when the US is flexing its military and economic muscle, the Canadian prime minister provided a sharp contrast to the many politicians who have refrained from speaking honestly in favour of flattering Trump or staying quiet altogether, lest they attract his ire.
In a way, Carney was the perfect messenger for this diagnosis. A former banker and political outsider, he has already been forced to reckon with the tough choices now being weighed up by leaders in Britain and Europe. The US is Canada’s largest trading partner, responsible for 62.2 per cent of trade (China, its next largest, responsible for just under 8 per cent). Canada’s security is also deeply enmeshed with the US, with a major reliance on both Nato and the North American Aerospace Defense Command. So when Trump announced tariffs of 35 per cent on its closest ally and threatened its territorial sovereignty with jibes about becoming the “51st state”, Canadians had little choice but to start thinking of a world decoupled from the US.
At Davos, Carney name-checked the Finnish prime minister Alexander Stubb’s “values-based realism”, with its aim to be both “principled” and “pragmatic”. (The related term “progressive realism”, previously coined by David Lammy, seems to have been all but forgotten by Western leaders.) What does “principled” and “pragmatic” look like to Carney? The prime minister landed in Davos fresh from trips to China and Qatar, where he had shored up significant trade deals. Pragmatic means taking the world “as it is” rather than as “we wish” it to be, where smaller nations must seek deals with great powers, as belligerent as they might be. But they will abandon the pretence that such deals are about liberal ideals, not self-interest, while they do so.
The principled part of Carney’s equation requires the world’s middle powers – in Europe, in Asia, across the Commonwealth – to work together, to enter into agreements that “function as described”. The US and other great powers might have economic and military leverage, but middle powers could together “build something bigger, better, stronger and more just”. It was seemingly what the West had been waiting for. Carney received a rare standing ovation at Davos and in the days that followed, his words were almost universally praised. The speech was a success. But it was not without risk.
The US was narrowing its sights as Davos continued. On 22 January, America’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, gave an interview to the alt-right activist Jack Posobiec, and weighed in on Alberta’s burgeoning separatist movement. “[There’s a] rumour that they may have a referendum on whether they want to stay in Canada or not,” Bessent said. “I think we should let them come down into the US, and Alberta is a natural partner for the US. They have great resources.”
The rumours are true. There is a group called the Alberta Prosperity Project that has been campaigning for a referendum on seceding from Canada; it has until May to collect at least 177,000 signatures – or 10 per cent of eligible voters – in order to be granted one. It is a real but undeniably fringe movement; Carney’s approval ratings across Canada are at 60 per cent. The leaders of the group have been meeting with Trump administration officials to discuss American support and even financing.
And Bessent is not the only Maga figure imagining the break-up of Canada. His comments to Posobiec were an echo of Steve Bannon, who has repeatedly expressed support for Alberta separatism. Bannon has also long dwelled on the threat China poses to the US via Canada, both on his podcast War Room and in private conversations. “Canada is in the vital national security interest of the United States,” Bannon said on the 17 January episode. “This is why I say they could be the next Ukraine.”
The reference to Ukraine is no coincidence. Just as Vladimir Putin claimed that Nato was a hostile force intent on cosying up with its neighbour, in Bannon’s mind China is intent on infiltrating Canada to reach its real target: the US. And just as Kremlin-sponsored propaganda about dissatisfaction among the local population of eastern Ukraine was used as a pretext for Russia’s annexation of Crimea and invasion of the Donbas region, there is a growing fear that the White House could use Alberta’s fringe movement as justification for military interference. (It’s perhaps not surprising that Maga figures are aligning with the minor Alberta group, as opposed to the far more popular and entrenched separatist movement in Quebec. Although the French-speaking province has long supported mainstream local parties that advocate Quebec nationalism or sovereignty, their underlying hostility to English-speaking Canada would almost certainly extend to America more broadly.)
How would Canadian armed forces cope in the event of a US military invasion? Not well. On 20 January an editorial in the Canadian newspaper, the Globe and Mail, revealed that the military had modelled how it would respond to a hypothetical US invasion. Despite a 55 per cent bump in new military recruits last year, the model found that Canada’s armed forces lacked the “personnel or the sophisticated equipment needed to fend off a conventional American attack” and would need to rely on “unconventional warfare in which small groups of irregular military or armed civilians would resort to ambushes, sabotage, drone warfare or hit-and-run tactics”.
No one, however, is under the illusion that Trump needs to use military aggression to devastate its ally. As Carney was pointing out America’s transactionalism at Davos, Trump was threatening Europe with tariffs over its refusal to hand over Greenland. It wasn’t long before that transactionalism was redirected. In a post on Truth Social on 25 January, Trump threatened 100 per cent tariffs on Canadian goods “if Canada makes a deal with China”. (Trump also referred to the prime minister as “governor” Carney, a nickname he’d previously given to Justin Trudeau, but had until now refrained from using it with Carney.) There’s nothing to suggest that Canada and China have been discussing a free-trade deal; Carney’s recent trip to Beijing saw them agree a relatively limited deal in which Canada will reduce tariffs on a set number of Chinese electric vehicles, while China will reduce tariffs on Canadian canola oil.
And yet here was the Trump that Carney described in his speech: “Using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” Trump’s implicit message was clear, for Canada and any other middle powers that might be watching: the old order may be ruptured, but the US still reigns.
Trump’s vengeful response to Carney’s speech was the most predictable move he’s made this year. It is far less certain how Canada’s other allies will respond. When the glow of the Davos honeymoon fades, will London, Paris, Brussels and beyond be prepared to recalibrate?
There are signs that spines are stiffening when it comes to responding to Trump. Emmanuel Macron’s speech at Davos, while not nearly as punchy as Carney’s and somewhat undermined by his decision to wear aviators indoors to mask an eye condition, pointedly stated: “We do prefer respect to bullies – and we do prefer rule of law to brutality.” When Trump unveiled his “Board of Peace” at Davos on 22 January, it became apparent that the liberal democracies had steered clear. Instead, the US president’s alternative to the United Nations was a who’s who of autocratic nations.
But Canadians have been disappointed before. Last summer when European politicians started floating the idea of Canada joining the European Union, bureaucrats in Brussels pointed out that the EU treaty forbids any nation not in Europe from joining. After Keir Starmer hand-delivered a letter from King Charles to Trump, inviting him for a second state visit well after the US president had begun threatening Canadian sovereignty, many in the country felt betrayed by their monarch. (A majority of Canadians had already soured on the idea of being led by a constitutional monarchy; that number has presumably only increased since.)
Despite the rally around Mark Carney in the days after Davos, it’s not difficult to imagine being disappointed again. The most acute threat to Canada remains Donald Trump. But the deeper, more long-term danger is that Canada will have to face a hostile US on its own as its allies, one by one, decide that letting go of the old order is not so easy, that a decaying special relationship is better than nothing, that appeasement might be the most pragmatic move of all. The useful fiction will remain intact, the great power will win and Canadians will suffer what they must.
[Further reading: Europe’s reckoning over Greenland has arrived]
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This article appears in the 28 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, How we escape Trump
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