Canadian prime minister Mark Carney just stood up to Donald Trump at the World Economic Forum (WEF). After a year of our own prime minister Keir Starmer sniveling in Trump’s presence at every opportunity, you might have forgotten national leaders can do such things.

Carney told an audience the old ‘rules based’ order was always an illusion. And that middle powers like Canada had to stick up for their values, work together, and stand up to great power bullying.

Fair play to him. The Canadian put a clear, calm argument in a way other leaders – our own included – have seemed incapable of. You can read a full transcript here, or watch for yourself below:

In effect, Carney simply used his time slot at the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos to say what everyone is thinking. He said he was there to talk:

about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints.

Carney shows up Starmer

But our own weakness is an illusion too, he went on:

intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless.

Rather, he said

They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values.

Carney identified what a lot of smaller countries were feeling as a belligerent US has gone about threatening everyone:

It seems that every day we’re reminded…. that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.

He admitted “faced with this logic”:

there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety.

However, he went on:

A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable.

But the question now is:

whether we adapt by simply building higher walls, or whether we can do something more ambitious.

Strong stuff.  And with Donald Trump due to speak later today, we can probably expect a toddler meltdown.

Rejecting the lies

Carney said it was time to stop living the falsehood that there was a ‘rules-based order’ guaranteed by US power:

We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, 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.

That fiction, Carney said, had been “useful”:

and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

But that party is now over:

Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration.

Adding:

You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

Start naming reality

Carney said it was time to start calling the system what is was. And a major part of that requires us to stop labouring over a system that no longer exists:

Stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is – a system of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.

That means:

building what we claim to believe in, rather than waiting for the old order to be restored. It means creating institutions and agreements that function as described.

And it means reducing the leverage that enables coercion – that’s building a strong domestic economy. It should be every government’s immediate priority.

But here is the thing. In essence, Carney is a technocratic liberal much like Keir Starmer. And the fact his country shares a land border with the US – it’s biggest trading partner – is significant.  It means there are fewer and fewer excuses for not standing up to Trump. If a Canadian PM can do it, with all that is at stake, Keir Starmer needs to stop scrabbling for Trump’s approval quick sharp.

And if he hasn’t got the minerals, we need a government that has the courage to do so.

Featured image via the Canary

By Joe Glenton

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