Two speeches: Trump weaves, Carney swerves

Two leaders gave two speeches with two styles but one message: the old world order is over. One taut with tension, the other tautological with familiar meanderings. Each spoke hard truths. Carney to the world, Trump to Canada.

U.S. President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Mark Carney voyaged to Davos for the annual World Economic Forum gathering. More exclusive than a Vanity Fair after-party, more expensive than Trump’s ballroom, the WEF is where the world’s political and business elites declare and despair of the state of the world around them.

Carney travelled east to west on Can Force One after signing trade and investment deals with two of the world’s most controversial regimes, communist China and authoritarian Qatar. Trump travelled west to east on Air Force One, a controversial regime unto himself, after demanding Greenland be signed over to the United States.

This year, there was much to declaim about. Carney was up first. His speech was tautly delivered with the tension of declaring a swerve. There’s been a “rupture in the world order,” he began, “and the dawn of a brutal reality in which great-power geopolitics is unconstrained.” Unnamed, but not unknown, were the great powers of China, Russia and America.

Carney explained the rupture in action. They use “economic integration as weapons. Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” The rules-based world order was over; a force-based world order has replaced it.

To counter this disruptive reality, the prime minister proposed a new type of realpolitik for a dog-eat-dog world. “We actively take on the world as it is, not wait for the world as we wish it to be” he stated. Carney then summoned forth a middle-power mantra of like-minded nations actively coalescing around common interests and values to avoid being dinner on some great power plate. “It is building the coalitions that work, issue by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together,” Carney said. Principled pragmatism, he labelled it. The Carney Doctrine is born.

The prime minister’s speech was both lauded and larded. Lauded internationally as speaking truth to power, the swerve in global relations Carney outlined has been larded with extra meaning and world consequence far beyond the usual remit of a Canadian prime ministerial speech. And frankly, far beyond the modest if meaningful suggestions he offered. He declared a rupture but did not propose an actual replacement. Canada will continue to strive to make international institutions and rules work. It just won’t put all its eggs in that one basket. Especially if it has a hole in it. Last week’s warming of relations with China and Qatar demonstrate that.

The U.S. president’s speech was classic Donald Trump weave. All over the map except for the parts he wants to add to America. It was an hour-plus rendition of Trump’s “America is back” greatest hits while “Europe has gone off the rails.” “We’ve gotten nothing out of NATO except to pay for it,” he cried, reminding that allies and alliances are to be bought and paid for. Shared cheques, not shared values, are the basis of Trump’s new world order.

The world’s biggest travelling stage cannot stand being upstaged. Predictably, Carney got called out. “Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, by the way. They should be grateful also. But they’re not,” Trump said. “I watched their prime minister yesterday. He wasn’t so grateful, they should be grateful to us, Canada. Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”

Trump’s hard truth to Canadians is that we do get “freebies” from the U.S. From the Cold War onward, we have been shielded from attack by the American nuclear umbrella and our NATO and Norad alliance partnerships. “Geography made us neighbours … and necessity has made us allies,” President John F. Kennedy famously said.

But Canada’s economic burden-sharing that goes with those realities never matched the consequences of not having that shield. We’ve yet to meet our NATO commitment to spend two per cent of GDP on defence, languishing around 1.5 per cent. The Carney government has committed to meet this target this year. Budget 2025 proposed $30 billion in new defence and security investment as part of doing this, doubling spending by 2030.

We’ll see. Although the third-largest expenditure item in the federal budget, promised defence spending increases never seem to materialize. Military procurement remains notoriously laboured and inefficient. But military force is the backbone of hard-power projection. Canadian governments have tended to prefer soft-power talk and a friendly face for engagement in international affairs. That needs to change in a great power game of hegemonic rivalry.

The competing Carney and Trump doctrines are complementary on this one point: both demand a place for hard power military might. For Canada, there can be no defence freebies any longer. America foreign policy has become acquisitive under Trump. It covets its neighbours, belying the Bibles its top officials ostentatiously carry. We’d be wise to pay up while we pay attention.

Canada has a new foreign policy. The prime minister seems to mean it. His government now needs to act it.

David McLaughlin is a former clerk of the executive council and cabinet secretary in the Manitoba government.