*** 1/21/26 - A New World Order at Davos (comments on Davos Speeches by Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney + new Greenland Deal?) .........
Buzz Sawyer
"The prime minister’s main message was that the “rules-based international order,” which has shaped world politics since the end of World War II, is dead—and not likely to be revived. He noted that it was always a bit of a myth anyway, and that America’s allies pretended to embrace it because, for much of this time but especially during the Cold War, bowing to U.S. dominance was an acceptable cost of enjoying U.S. economic favors and security guarantees.
Now, under Trump, the benefits of this arrangement have been reduced, if not eliminated. Though Carney was careful to not utter Trump’s name or even draw too explicit a contrast with previous presidents, his point was clear:
Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.
In response to these changes, he said, middle powers, such as Canada, must engage in “principled pragmatism” and band together. He elaborated:
This is not naïve multilateralism. … It’s building coalitions that work issue by issue with partners who share enough common ground to act together … creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities. Our view is, the middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.
1 day ago
A New World Order at Davos
Trump’s bombast has made it clear that smaller nations must band together. They’re finally starting to.
By Fred Kaplan Jan 21, 2026On Tuesday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a speech on the need for “middle-sized” countries to now form their own alliances, breaking away from the destructive dominance of great powers, including the United States.
On Wednesday, President Donald Trump gave a speech that unintentionally confirmed Carney’s message and heightened its urgency.
Both speeches were delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, an annual confab of the globe’s political and financial leaders that usually sparks little interest outside its walls. But this year’s session is worth all of our attention—it’s marking the pivot to a whole new world.
Trump’s speech, lasting an hour and 12 minutes, was full of his familiar ramble of lies, ignorance, and insults. The difference was that almost everyone in this audience saw through the nonsense and wasn’t amused. (Laughs were few; applause was tepid.)
The only newsworthy moment came when the president said that he wouldn’t use military force to acquire Greenland, prompting a sigh of relief from Europeans and a halt to Tuesday’s tanking of the stock market. But then he doubled down on his insistence that the U.S. had once owned the icy island (untrue) and needs to reacquire it for national security (also untrue).
Otherwise, it was a litany of false boasts (ending “eight-plus wars,” lowering food and gas prices, opening hundreds of steel plants across America) and baseless grievances. The latter included the “stolen” 2020 election, the ingratitude of everyone he has helped, and a NATO alliance in which the U.S. does everything and Europe does nothing. (He neglected, among other things, that the allies came to our aid after the 9/11 attacks, invoking the treaty’s Article 5 for the first time, and subsequently lost about 900 of their troops during the war in Afghanistan.)
It was a rude speech, maybe the rudest by a national leader in Davos history. Partly for that reason, it was also a remarkably unimportant speech—because it failed to address, in any serious way, the Canadian leader’s speech, which is being widely recognized as setting the agenda for our time. (Trump briefly scoffed at Carney’s address, suggesting that he had heard it.)
The prime minister’s main message was that the “rules-based international order,” which has shaped world politics since the end of World War II, is dead—and not likely to be revived. He noted that it was always a bit of a myth anyway, and that America’s allies pretended to embrace it because, for much of this time but especially during the Cold War, bowing to U.S. dominance was an acceptable cost of enjoying U.S. economic favors and security guarantees.
Now, under Trump, the benefits of this arrangement have been reduced, if not eliminated. Though Carney was careful to not utter Trump’s name or even draw too explicit a contrast with previous presidents, his point was clear:
Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.
In response to these changes, he said, middle powers, such as Canada, must engage in “principled pragmatism” and band together. He elaborated:
This is not naïve multilateralism. … It’s building coalitions that work issue by issue with partners who share enough common ground to act together … creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities. Our view is, the middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.
Unwittingly, in his speech the next day, Trump confirmed the point, bellowing the many ways that he could eat the middle countries for breakfast, bombing and tariffing them into oblivion if he so chose.
It’s not the first time he’s made such bellicose boasts. In an interview this month with the New York Times, a conversation that Carney and everyone else at Davos no doubt read closely, the president said he feels limited in his actions not by international law but only by “my own morality, my own mind—it’s the only thing that can stop me.” Observing his morality and mind on unvarnished display at Davos, the leaders of middle-sized countries could conclude only that Carney’s was the most plausible path to not just peace and prosperity but, perhaps, survival.
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Read MoreIt is a path strewn with risk. Carney noted the need for middle countries to spend more on defense, as Canada and others are already doing to some extent. He sidestepped the fact that, at least presently, neither NATO nor any other alliance can organize, much less mount, an effective defense against a determined aggressor without American leadership. I’ve asked defense experts in Berlin and London how long it would take for, say, the European Union to build a cohesive, truly independent defense force if they started right now with the necessary budgets. They have all answered with the same estimate: about 10 years.
This is the craw that sticks in the throats of mindful Europeans who talk about “strategic autonomy.” This is why they have kowtowed to Trump, praised his wisdom, pretended that their compliments stem from respect and not, as is really the case, from fear of abandonment. The new thing in trans-Atlantic (and trans-Pacific) relations—which this session of Davos has highlighted in the wake of Trump’s vindictive tariffs and imperial threats toward Greenland—is that the pretense can no longer be sustained. As Carney put it, the “bargain,” which the middle countries have observed with their protector all these decades, “no longer works. … We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality,” but now, Carney noted, the gaps have grown too large. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
It’s clear the prime minister understands that ruptures are harder to navigate than transitions, especially when it comes to national security and defense.
This has been a season of newly prominent leaders quoting great radical thinkers. New York’s new mayor, Zohran Mamdani, began his victory speech by quoting Eugene Debs. Carney’s Davos speech drew a great deal from Vaclav Havel’s writings on the “power of the powerless.” In this spirit, I will close, a bit soberly, with a famous line from the Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks: “The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.”
Carney laid out a vision of the new world, where “from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.” But the tense drama of the next few months and years may be in how they—and all of us—deal with the monsters.