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U.S. President Donald Trump stands on the stage prior to addressing a meeting of Global Business Leaders at the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos on Wednesday.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press
The War of the Greenlandic Accession appears to have ended before it began, the President of the United States having supposedly negotiated a deal on the island’s future with the Secretary-General of NATO, a deal that a) no one can describe in any detail, b) neither of them has any mandate to negotiate and c) appears to amount to a ratification of the status quo.
Still, the past few weeks have not been a complete waste. They have almost certainly brought an end to NATO as a credible military alliance. They have demonstrated, to a degree that should convince any remaining doubters, that Donald Trump is completely out of his skull. And they have put the final nail in the strategy of accommodating him. There will be no more attempts to flatter, bribe or otherwise sweet-talk the toddler President. America’s allies are done with Mr. Trump – and to a lesser extent, America.
Hence the extraordinary reaction to the Prime Minister’s Davos speech. It has been, to be sure, wildly overpraised. The rhetoric is not particularly eloquent, the insights not especially scintillating. Its main recommendation, that middle powers should lessen their exposure to the great powers by trading more with each other, is essentially warmed-over friendshoring.
Its impact, rather, comes from its candour, its clarity, and, perhaps most of all, its timing. Had Mark Carney delivered the same speech even six months ago, the response from other world leaders might have been a weary, “Yes, you’re right, but.” As it was, it detonated with the force of half a ton of gelignite. Mr. Carney crystallized the rebellious mood in the room, giving it meaning, direction and hope.
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Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks during the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday.Markus Schreiber/The Associated Press
The central metaphor, Václav Havel’s famous parable of the shopkeeper in a communist state who keeps a sign in his window parroting a regime slogan, though he does not believe in it, seems inapt at first. The point of the story was that the willingness of the shopkeeper, and other like him, to repeat something everyone knows to be untrue – in Havel’s phrase, to “live within a lie” – is what really sustained the regime.
Likewise, Mr. Carney describes the “rules-based international order” that prevailed for the last several decades as having been something of “a pleasant fiction,” one that the richer nations pretended to believe in so long as it seemed to deliver, but which we must now admit is gone forever. It is time, he says, for all these countries to “take their signs down.”
But the RBIO was not a totalitarian order: it was a voluntary association of states – one that, moreover, broadly worked. If we are indeed witnessing its collapse, it is not because those in its thrall discovered a collective will to resist it, but because the great power most responsible for making it work, the United States, has suddenly and willfully decided to throw it in the trash can.
Never mind. I suspect Mr. Carney framed it that way off the top as a cover, to soften his real message, which is a call for those states who, by their submission to great power dictates, have enabled the dismantling of the RBIO, even as they publicly pine for its return, to take down their signs.
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.
There can be no return to the RBIO, Mr. Carney said, because the fundamental assumption on which it was based – a relatively benign power, in the form of the United States, as its backstop – no longer applies. The deep trade integration that was possible under the RBIO has been transformed from a broad force for good to a tool of imperialism.
Great powers have increasingly taken to using tariffs, supply chain vulnerability, and investment as weapons against their trading partners. Russia and China led the way. Now they have been joined by the United States.
Continuing to pursue integration with what Mr. Carney tactfully refers to throughout as “the hegemon” is simply an invitation to be manipulated and exploited. “You cannot ‘live within the lie’ of mutual benefit through integration,” Mr. Carney advises, “when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”
What is the alternative? The temptation, Mr. Carney says, is to reduce our vulnerability by retreating within our own borders, closing ourselves to trade generally. The real answer is to trade more with like-minded countries: “Coalitions that work, issue by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together.” A network of rules-based orders, in other words, based not on deference to any hegemon but shared values and mutual benefit.
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It’s a nervy thing for the leader of a country that depends on the U.S. for 75 per cent of its exports to say. Which may also account for its impact.
The good news is: the great powers’ grip can be broken. Hegemons, Mr. Carney says, “cannot continually monetize their relationships.” Far from enforcing submission to American hegemony, Mr. Trump’s tariffs are inducing other countries to trade around it. The European Union has just signed a free-trade agreement with the Mercosur group of South American countries. Another major deal, between the EU and the Trans-Pacific Partnership is in the works.
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People walk on a street in Nuuk, Greenland. Mr. Trump threatened to impose new tariffs on European countries opposed to his Greenland takeover plan. He later walked back his threat and also ruled out the use of force.Evgeniy Maloletka/The Associated Press
One lesson in all this is the importance of legitimacy. Middle powers were willing to collaborate in the Pax Americana so long as the United States was seen as a force for good – not always or perfectly, but on the whole. The narrow self-interest and naked aggression of the Trump regime has destroyed its legitimacy. Without it, without the willing participation of the other powers, the U.S. is at risk of becoming a paper tiger.
The other is the importance of collective action. The whole history of Mr. Trump’s rise has been his ability to exploit divisions – within the United States, and between countries – playing one potential opponent off against the other: divide and rule, in other words.
That era, perhaps, is at an end. The shock of Mr. Trump’s threat to invade Greenland seems to have finally shaken Europe, at least, out of its illusions. European leaders stood together against Mr. Trump. In the end, Mr. Trump backed down.
That does not mean the threat has gone away, however. Mr. Trump’s moods are mercurial; his promises are worthless. The Greenland issue could return within a month. Or other threats could materialize: in fact, almost certainly will. There is still a madman in the White House, who is unlikely to have learned any lessons from this episode, and who is guided by no principle other than self-aggrandizement.
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Worse, the problem is not just Mr. Trump. Something has cracked in American society, that it could elect so manifestly unfit a person, not once, but twice. The checks and balances that were supposed to contain him have manifestly failed. Mr. Trump could fall under the proverbial bus tomorrow. But the world could have no assurance of any lasting return to sanity in the United States.
This new era of great-power predation, then, is quite unlike the last. In the previous century we could always count on the United States to ride to the defence of the democracies against any rising dictatorship. For the foreseeable future it must be counted as an unreliable ally at best, an enemy at worst. The trust on which the NATO alliance, in particular, depends is broken.
What is to be done? How can the democratic world defend itself, without the United States? How can it defend itself from the United States? How can Canada, in particular, survive and prosper, given the precarity of our situation?
The answer is to apply Mr. Carney’s formula more generally: Stick together. Call things by their proper name. Understand the importance in human events of moral legitimacy – that hard power is insufficient, without the soft power to back it up. But understand, too, that soft power must ultimately be defended by hard power.
The short-term imperative is for the democratic forces in the United States to recover their nerve. The Trumpists seized the advantage over the past year by a combination of speed and fanaticism. They seemed to be moving on all fronts simultaneously, without regard for law, or precedent, or human decency. Mostly, they benefited from their opponents’ failure of imagination – their inability to conceive of just what the Trump people were capable of.
That only gets you so far, however. Like the European leaders, Mr. Trump’s domestic opponents now understand better what they are up against, and what they have to do to stop it. Fortunately, the people around Mr. Trump are not terribly bright. They have plainly taken on far more than they can handle – provided their opponents act together.
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The U.S. President meets with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte during a meeting on the sidelines of the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press
Meanwhile, the rest of the democratic world will have to accept that the alliance with the United States has been irreparably damaged, at least for the time being, and move on. NATO may be dead, but that does not mean other alliances cannot be formed: NATO, minus the U.S., but plus Japan, Canada, Australia and some of the other democracies.
Perhaps this Democratic League, or whatever it might be called, might also have a trade dimension, complete with what some have called “an economic Article 5”: a provision that a tariff on one member is to be regarded as a tariff on all, with appropriate retaliatory measures.
And Canada? Short-term, the Prime Minister should follow his own logic, and not invest too heavily in a renewed continental trade deal. If experience is any guide, Mr. Trump will issue a series of extravagant demands as the price of his signature. Moreover, we can have no assurance that he would keep any undertakings he made in return.
And trade, as such, is perhaps the least of our worries. Rather, it is the Trump administration’s broader agenda of domination, in which trade is but one of the weapons at its disposal. To counter this, we need to show that we have options (hence the China démarche); allies (hence the expressions of solidarity with Europe, to the point of being willing to send troops, if need be, to Greenland); and capacity economic and military: the ability to endure harm at the hands of the Americans, and to inflict it, if necessary, on them.
Fixing our anemic economic growth rate, in other words, is no longer merely desirable: it is an urgent necessity, a matter of national security. Without it, we will be less able to withstand Trumpian blackmail. Nor will we be able to finance the enormous military buildup on which we are already engaged.
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In the longer term, we must understand how fundamentally our world has changed. For the past 150 years, we have had the comfort of knowing that our borders were secure, protected on three sides by oceans and on the fourth, by the Great Republic to our south. Today, who can say whether we will still be in possession of all our present territory at the end of the century – or at the end of the decade – or even at the end of this year?
And the minute any piece of the country is taken, all bets are off. The precedent having been set, other powers will probe further, testing what we are willing to defend, and what we are not. Not only our territory will be in play then, but our democracy, our freedom, our whole way of life.
If we fully understand how much we are now at risk, then we will be willing to make the changes that are required. That starts with inculcating a culture of self-defence, a recognition that we cannot necessarily rely on others to defend us but must be willing to defend ourselves.
That has not been part of our mindset until now. We have gone to war to defend other nations. We have never had to go to war to defend our own. We have never even had to sacrifice much for it. No Canadian leader of recent times would think of telling Canadians, “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” Perhaps they should start.
