Prime Minister Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos last week has received remarkable international acclaim and even talk of a “Carney Doctrine” in foreign policy.

It has not been widely noted that a 2022 speech to the Brookings Institution by his recent rival for the Liberal leadership, then-foreign minister Chrystia Freeland, struck some of the same notes and also generated discussion of a “Freeland Doctrine.” While the ultimate significance of Carney’s speech depends on the degree to which its general principles are fleshed out with concrete proposals and measures, to succeed his policies should borrow heavily from those Freeland outlined.

The Prime Minister’s speech articulated and is shaping an emerging consensus that the liberal international order has ended with “a rupture, not a transition”, and that President Trump cannot be dealt with as if  he acted within the bounds of normal statecraft. Freeland’s speech came earlier in the gradual unravelling of that order, and before Trump’s return to the White House, but noted the return of aggressive great-power competition, above all with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The crucial difference lies in the emphasis of their respective prescriptions.
Carney called for collaboration among “middle powers like Canada” on the basis of “variable geometry” through “different coalitions for different issues”.  He noted that “not every partner will share our values” but that “we actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.”

Freeland, like Carney, rejected autarchy within national fortresses, but called not for ad hoc coalitions but for cooperation with fellow democracies, urging an effort “to identify shared values” and practice “friend-shoring”, so that “where democracies must be strategically vulnerable, we should be vulnerable to each........

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