Mark Carney spoke for America’s frustrated allies at Davos – but they’re not going anywhere

America’s Western allies have had enough—or so they say.

This week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, one world leader after another expressed frustration with the United States over its increasingly hostile behavior toward them and called for a new way forward.

According to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, it is time for Europe to seek a permanent break with the US “Nostalgia will not bring back the old order,” said von der Leyen. “It is time to seize this opportunity and build a new independent Europe.”

If this whole discussion sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve heard it before.

“There are so many red lines crossed,” Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever said in response to President Donald Trump’s threat to impose tariffs on Greenland, “that you have a choice between self-respect – being a happy vassal is one thing. Being a miserable slave is another.”

“Europe has very powerful tools now and we have to use them when we are not respected,” French President Emmanuel Macron snarled.

But perhaps the most direct criticism of Trump – and call for a new world order – came from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who told the assembled global elite: “We are in the middle of a rupture, not a transition.” Carney stated that “the great powers … using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to exploit” cannot continue.

“We live in an era of great power rivalry,” Carney said. “The rule-based order is fading” and “the middle powers [such as Canada] we have to act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

The comments represent the logical conclusion to Trump’s first year in office, in which he has seemingly gone out of his way to poke a finger in the eye of key NATO allies and undermine some of America’s longest-lasting and most beneficial bilateral relationships.

But if this whole discussion sounds familiar, it’s because we’ve heard it before.

In the waning days of the Cold War, Luxembourg Prime Minister and Council of Europe President Jacques Loos infamously declared, “This is Europe’s time, not America’s.”

In February 2003, as America prepared to go to war in Iraq and American leaders mocked America’s “old” European allies, French President Jacques Chirac warned of a US-dominated unipolar world and said that “Europe must realize the importance of expressing its own vision of the world’s problems and backing it up with a common, credible defense.”

In 2017, after a disastrous G-7 summit with Trump, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said: “The era when Europe could rely on others is over” and argued that Europe must take its fate into its own hands.

But then a funny thing happened.

Loos was referring to the war going on in the former Yugoslavia, and although many European leaders believed that the time had come for Europe to mind its own continent’s affairs, US military power, combined with diplomatic force, ended the conflict in the Balkans.

Perhaps this time is different, and America’s allies have reached breaking point with bullying and pandering to America with unilateralism. But skepticism is justified.

In 2009, when President Barack Obama replaced George W. Bush in the White House, Europe returned to the tried and true paradigm of following America’s lead on the world stage. In 2021, when Joe Biden reached the Oval Office, the same pattern emerged again. And when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, it was again the US that took the lead in assembling a European coalition to oppose Vladimir Putin’s military aggression.

Perhaps this time is different, and America’s allies have reached breaking point with bullying and pandering to America with unilateralism. But skepticism is justified.

As Chris Fettweis, a professor of international affairs at Tulane University, told me, “People always think we’re on the cusp of a new world order … and they’re usually wrong.”

Indeed, a striking element of Carney’s Davos speech was how forcefully the Canadian prime minister spoke about the importance of multilateralism and the dangers of great powers going it alone. “A world of fortresses,” he said, “will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable. . . . If great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values ​​for the unfettered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionism will become harder to replicate.”

Carney’s vision of multilateralism, presented at Davos, was offered as a hedge against American aggression and a path for middle-power countries to follow as long as America is in the grip of Trump’s mania and ignorance.

In recent weeks, Canada has acted on Carney’s words. Ottawa has reduced trade barriers with China, including an agreement last week with Beijing that will increase imports of electric vehicles in exchange for easing China’s restrictions on Canadian agricultural imports. French President Emmanuel Macron also spoke at Davos about encouraging more Chinese investment in Europe.

But Carney surely knows that for Canada, which is so dependent on the US as a trading partner, a middle-power partnership will not trump a complete American return to rogue nation status. The same is almost certainly true for Europe. America’s allies may be exasperated by Trump’s behavior, but they too prefer a return to the status quo over any other potential outcome.

Great and sometimes benevolent powers like the US do not grow on trees, and an economic and political alliance with China for Canada and Europe is not really on the table.

Indeed, there was another message implicit in Carney’s words – and indeed, they can be heard in the words of almost every European leader condemning what America has become: Get back to reality!

Everything that Trump has broken can apparently be put back together.

For all of Trump’s excesses and belligerent rhetoric, he has largely left hurt feelings in his wake. Trump did not pull the US out of NATO. He has largely maintained American support for Ukraine. And on Wednesday night, Trump announced he was calling off his threatened trade war with Europe after “forming the framework for a future deal on Greenland” — which The New York Times says will likely be little more than “a compromise in which Denmark would grant the United States sovereignty over small pockets of Greenlandic land where the United States could build military bases.”

In other words, everything that Trump apparently broke can still be put back together.

Canadian and European leaders are undoubtedly frustrated and angered by how unreliable an ally the US has become and how often this kind of inappropriate behavior has been repeated over the past 25 years.

But make no mistake, they would almost certainly welcome a sane America back with open arms.

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