Opinion | Trump Broke The Old World Order, So Carney Flies To PM Modi

When a Canadian prime minister boards a plane to New Delhi, the most important question is not what he is flying towards. It is what he is flying away from

When a Canadian prime minister boards a plane to New Delhi, the most important question is not what he is flying towards. It is what he is flying away from.

Mark Carney touched down in Mumbai on February 27, arriving in India for a four-day visit that officials from both governments are already describing as potentially transformational.

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The agenda(s), a comprehensive economic partnership agreement, uranium supply deals, critical minerals, artificial intelligence, and defence cooperation, are ambitious enough on their own terms. The full significance of Carney’s presence in India, however, becomes legible only when read against a broader context: the systematic dismantling of the post-war trading architecture by the United States, and the profound strategic panic that has sent Ottawa searching, urgently and openly, for new anchors.

This is not primarily a story about India and Canada. It is a story about what happens to middle powers when the order they depended upon stops pretending to protect them.

‘WE ARE IN THE MIDST OF A RUPTURE’

Carney said it at Davos in January. Standing before the assembled leadership of the World Economic Forum (WEF), he declared that the world was experiencing “a rupture, not a transition".

The speech earned a standing ovation, rare by the forum’s usually restrained standards, and its central argument was worth the applause: great powers had begun using economic integration as a weapon, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, and supply chains as vulnerabilities to exploit. The multilateral institutions that middle powers had relied upon, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and the Conference of the Parties, were not merely weakened; they were under direct, deliberate threat. Nostalgia, Carney told his audience, was not a strategy.

The source of the rupture requires no subtlety to name. Since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs on Canadian goods, threatened the territorial sovereignty of a NATO ally, and pursued a transactional foreign policy that treats long-standing partnerships as liabilities to be monetised.

Canada, which routes roughly three-quarters of its goods trade through the US and ships nearly all of its energy exports south of the border, has found itself uniquely and painfully exposed. According to the Canadian Chamber of Commerce, the economic risk from US tariff escalation is existential by any conventional measure.

The objective has consequently become stark: reduce that dependence, and do so quickly. India is the obvious destination for a country attempting that recalibration.

A RELATIONSHIP REBUILT FROM RUBBLE

It would be easy to forget, given the pace of the present rapprochement, just how badly Canada-India relations had collapsed.

In 2023, then prime minister Justin Trudeau publicly accused Indian government agents of potential involvement in the killing of Sikh separatist leader Hardeep Singh Nijjar in British Columbia. India rejected the allegation as absurd and politically motivated.

Diplomats were expelled in both directions. High commissioners were recalled. A diplomatic crisis left deep institutional scars, with trust collapsing on both sides and accusations of transnational repression and electoral interference poisoning the atmosphere.

The turnaround, when it came, was swift and deliberate. When Carney replaced Trudeau in early 2025, Prime Minister Narendra Modi rang immediately to congratulate him.

The new prime minister moved to repair the relationship with a directness his predecessor had conspicuously lacked: inviting Modi to the G7 summit in Kananaskis in June last year, where the two leaders met bilaterally on Canadian soil.

High commissioners were reappointed in September. National security adviser Ajit Doval’s visit to Ottawa in February helped depoliticise the contentious security questions by embedding them within a structured bilateral mechanism, a move that, by placing difficult issues inside a process rather than a press conference, created the space for the diplomatic work that followed.

By November, at the G20 margins in Johannesburg, Carney and Modi had agreed to formally launch CEPA negotiations with a target of more than doubling two-way trade to USD 70 billion by 2030. That bilateral trade currently stands at roughly USD 30 billion annually, as per the Canadian PMO.

More than 600 Canadian companies operate in India. Canada’s so-called Maple 8 pension funds, the major institutional investors, including Brookfield and Fairfax, have already committed over USD 100 billion to Indian airports, logistics, renewable energy, and urban infrastructure. Analysts suggest that the figure could triple by 2030, with the right legal architecture in place.

India recently concluded its landmark trade agreement with the European Union, one of the largest in history and covering roughly two billion people. Dinesh Patnaik, India’s high commissioner to Canada, told CBC News that the deal will serve as a model for what New Delhi can now broker with Ottawa.

“I’m confident that, given the intent of both sides, both prime ministers are very keen to do it," Patnaik was quoted. “We are looking at one year, but I have a feeling it will be faster."

The strategic logic is compelling on both sides, which is precisely why it is accelerating. Canada needs what India can absorb.

It is an energy superpower, rich in uranium, critical minerals, and liquefied natural gas, entering a period in which its traditional export market is unreliable at best and predatory at worst.

India, in turn, is the world’s fastest-growing major economy, with an enormous and growing appetite for exactly those inputs: uranium to fuel its expanding nuclear power sector, critical minerals for its energy transition, LNG for its industrial base, digital services and AI infrastructure for its technology ambitions. The complementarities are not rhetorical, they are structural.

But the confluence runs deeper than resources. Both countries are navigating the same fundamental problem: an increasingly coercive international environment in which their primary relationships with great powers, the US for Canada, an unpredictable Washington for both, and an assertive Beijing for the wider region, have become sources of vulnerability rather than security.

As one Washington-based analyst on South Asia told Al Jazeera, the key external factor driving Carney’s visit to New Delhi is Trump’s trade war. Both countries, he observed, have seen their relations with the US slide since Trump returned to power in January last year.

This shared exposure creates a foundation for a genuine partnership that no amount of goodwill could have manufactured artificially.

PM MODI’S DECADE OF STRATEGIC PATIENCE

What Carney’s visit also represents is the payoff of a foreign policy built over a decade on strategic autonomy and deliberate multidirectional engagement.

Prime Minister Modi has spent 10 years cultivating India’s position as an indispensable partner across competing blocs, maintaining relationships with Washington, Moscow, and Brussels simultaneously; refusing to be corralled into any single alliance architecture; positioning India as the swing state of the emerging world order.

That posture attracted criticism, particularly during the period of Russia’s war in Ukraine, when New Delhi declined to sanction Moscow and continued importing Russian oil. But it also constructed leverage.

The result is visible. Middle powers across the West are quietly repositioning themselves around India as a counterweight to American unpredictability and Chinese assertiveness.

Carney’s intervention highlights a moment of unprecedented agency for countries willing to navigate the space between great powers, a space India has been occupying, with considerable discipline, for years. His flight to New Delhi is, in many ways, proof that the strategy has worked.

THE ARCHITECTURE OF A NEW MIDDLE

There is a risk that the rhetoric of middle-power solidarity, compelling in Davos, evocative in Ottawa, resonant in New Delhi, fails to congeal into the kind of robust, enforceable commitments that would give it real structural weight.

The history of CEPA itself is a sobering reminder: negotiations began in 2010, dragged through 16 years of starts and stops, and were derailed most recently by the very diplomatic crisis that Carney is now attempting to close. India has periodically seemed a difficult partner for trade deals; Canada has periodically seemed a difficult country in Indian eyes.

But the incentive structures have changed in ways that may, this time, be decisive. Canada’s ambition to ensure that half its trade is non-American is a survival calculation, and India’s ambition to attract western institutional capital, technology transfer, and energy security partnerships is central to its development model. Crucially, some of the old order’s safety valves have already collapsed, removing the fallback mechanisms that might once have cushioned delay.

The NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) dispute resolution panels, once a last resort for Canada in trade disputes, have been rendered largely inoperative by the refusal of the US to appoint new members, leaving Canadian exporters with no impartial forum for appeals. Other multilateral channels have similarly been hollowed out.

The result is that the geopolitical environment that once allowed both sides to delay, betting on American stability, multilateral reliability, and the predictability of a rules-based order, has collapsed in ways that cannot be reversed. What Carney is attempting, in New Delhi and in the wider Indo-Pacific tour that follows, taking in Australia and Japan, is the translation of his Davos speech into something concrete: a coalition of middle powers that cooperates, issue by issue, partner by partner, to build the resilience that no single country can now achieve alone.

As he told the forum in January: “If you are not at the table, you are on the menu."

India, after a decade of careful positioning, has a very large table. Carney’s arrival is evidence of precisely how large it has become.

© News18