“Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” Canadian PM Mark Carney said at the Davos economic gathering in Switzerland yesterday.Anadolu/Getty
President Donald Trump famously doesn’t like to read. And if his increasingly frequent public naps are any indication, his attention span is only getting shorter. But he did claim to watch what one historian praised as a “riveting, extraordinary and brutally honest” speech by Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada yesterday in Davos, Switzerland. And Trump’s reaction was typically petulant.
Imploring an audience chock-full of European officials at the annual World Economic Forum to recognize that “nostalgia is not a strategy,” Carney rallied middle powers—countries with economies similar to Canada’s—to bind together in the face of unilateral military and economic coercion by bigger powers. (Unspoken but clear among them: Trump’s America.) In doing so, Carney painted a stark view of a new world in which old rules have been torn up, and countries should stop pretending otherwise. “We are in the midst of a rupture,” he said, “not a transition.”
His call to the world: Resist subordination to the “great powers” who “have the market size, the military capacity and the leverage to dictate terms.”
“The middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” Carney said.
Trump was clearly irked. “Canada gets a lot of freebies from us,” he said today. “They should be grateful, but they’re not.”
“Canada lives because of the United States,” Trump said. “Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”
Carney’s speech, which received a standing ovation, is rooted in Carney’s personal experience after winning an election fought on protecting Canada’s sovereignty against economic attack from the United States in the form of tariffs and bellicose threats that Canada should be the 51st state of America. At Davos, Carney framed Trump’s attempts to “buy” Greenland as part of the same intimidation campaign: “Great powers began using economic integration as weapons,” he said. “Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.”
“We know the old order is not coming back,” he added. “But we believe that from the fracture, we can build something better, stronger, more just.”
Read the full transcript here. And watch the speech below.
