NATO

Matt Welch | 1.22.2026 1:18 PM

Acres of bad op-eds and half of Aaron Sorkin's career notwithstanding, political speeches, even of the highly anticipated variety, almost never matter and are typically forgotten by light of morning.

Not so Tuesday's Davos downer from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney. With the ashen-faced delivery of an insurance adjuster explaining why a claim can't be paid, Carney, the Liberal successor to Justin Trudeau, pronounced that the entire America-led post-World War II international system was experiencing a "rupture, not a transition," and that we'd best get on with it.

"The old order is not coming back," the P.M. intoned. "We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy."

Greeted as it was like a blunt rebuke to the erratic, bullying transactionalism of President Donald Trump, whose threat to seize Greenland from NATO ally Denmark hung over the proceedings like a giant cloud of farts, Carney's diagnosis nevertheless contained some similarities with the American delegation's message at the World Economic Forum.

"Globalization has FAILED," the United States Commerce Department triumphantly tweeted Tuesday, sharing a clip from Secretary Howard Lutnick claiming, with gross numerical inaccuracy, that the decades-long project of multilateral tariff reduction "has left America behind, [and] left American workers behind."

Sounds like the two sides are heading toward an amicable, grown-up divorce, right? Ha ha, have you met Donald Trump?

"Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, by the way," the president said in his meandering remarks Wednesday. "They should be grateful also, but they're not. I watched your Prime Minister yesterday, he wasn't so grateful. They should be grateful to U.S., Canada. Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that Mark, the next time you make your statements."

There are important lessons to be learned, and pitfalls to avoid, on both sides of the 49th parallel (as well as the Atlantic), about the difficult-to-contain emotions of dissolution, and the unforeseen geopolitics of institutional destruction.

Carney, to his credit, is attempting to sketch out a vision of what comes next for "middle powers"........

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