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In Munich, Leaders Say Goodbye to the Old World Order

The message was unmistakable: the era of shared assumptions is ending

Prime Minister Mark Carney was scheduled to deliver a much-anticipated speech to the Munich Security Conference this past weekend. The mass-casualty shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, changed that. Carney dispatched a senior delegation to Germany in his place—a crew that included Foreign Minister Anita Anand, Defence Minister David McGuinty, and Minister for AI and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon.

Understandable, given the circumstances, but unfortunate. Munich Security Conference is where the world’s power brokers gather each February to take the temperature of global order. If there was ever a conference the prime minister needed to be at, it was this one. Why? Because organizers decided to confront head-on the realities of the changes to international relations brought on by the Donald Trump administration.

In this, it has to be said, they are following in the footsteps of the speech that Carney delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 21. That speech talked about the global rupture caused by the Trump administration and suggested there was no going back. It urged avoidance of nostalgia and talked of a necessary reframing of international relations led by coalitions of middle and other powers. Carney missed the opportunity to reinforce that message, especially to his European counterparts, and to start to build some of the coalitions he talked about.

To set the stage for its conference, the MSC issued a conference report in advance of the gathering. This year’s version is entitled “Under Destruction” and features on the cover an elephant with, what I take to be, several gouges out of its hide. Maybe it’s limping as well.

Right off the bat, the report describes Trump as a “demolition man,” not unique in that role but, by far, the most consequential actor on the world stage. It suggests the United States, under Trump, has jettisoned the foundational understanding of how multilateral institutions and universal rules, open trade, and liberal democratic principles all served as strategic assets for the US. The Munich conference report finds a new order taking shape, what it calls a “neo-royalist” and “deals-based” order, characterized by the emergence of accepted spheres of influence, “private rent-seeking and distribution by involved actors” and “deal-making on a personalist basis.”

As Prime Minister Carney did, it cautions against advancing “hope” as a strategy and urges those powers who wish to defend global institutions, rules, and norms to understand they will require substantive military capabilities and the ability to compete “across a range of strategic levers of power.”

As for Europe, the MSC report urges an understanding that “the era in which Europe could rely on the US as an unquestioned security guarantor is over.” But it also finds a Europe unsure of its footing, still torn between denial over the destruction of old norms of transatlantic security (“Pax Americana”) and acceptance of a changed reality, while facing an ongoing Russian threat with as-yet-inadequate strength. The MSC report offers sobering reflection that the continent is entering a “prolonged era of confrontation.”

Countries in the Indo-Pacific, particularly traditional allies of the United States, now face something similar to the European dilemma. They are finding Trumpian policy toward the region vacillating in nature, while facing punitive American tariffs themselves and attacks on their defence spending. The key problem facing the region is that, unlike Europe, it has no real co-operative security mechanisms, absent the US. For the Indo-Pacific, the rise of China as a regional hegemon, and the possibility of American acquiescence in that rise, means an “uncertain new security landscape.”

The US comes off its singular hot seat in the MSC report in the chapter on global trade. Here, it shares the blame with China for the undermining of a rules-based system and for the use of economic coercion. The report does see some hopes in the emergence of new trade partnerships and “smaller coalitions” designed to sustain open trade and a rules-based system. But it’s unsure how much hope to place in this—worrying that the global trading system might collapse “entirely into the law of the strongest.”

That law arrived in the form of a US delegation led by Secretary of State (and still acting National Security Advisor) Marco Rubio, now a........

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