Gordon L. Weil
Does Donald Trump seek to install authoritarian rule or is
he merely using the government as his personal property?
The man who has everything may regard the presidency as his
opportunity to display what he considers to be his superiority. Or he may adhere to a philosophy that the
time has come to displace inefficient democracy with more central command.
Either way, the result is the same.
He goes unchecked by a Republican Congress, Supreme Court
and by governments abroad that believe that appeasing him is a workable foreign
policy. He succeeds so long as his
party and the world accede to his demands.
The November elections will tell Americans if the occupation
of Minneapolis is the wave of the future and if voting itself can be restricted
to ensure authoritarian power. Voting will
be much more than making congressional choices.
If Trump wins, he can provide more of the same. If he is repudiated, he can be expected to
claim the elections were fixed.
The polls report his falling popularity, attributed to a
sense of chaos and failure to keep his MAGA promises. In every policy area, only a minority approves
what he has done. But the GOP
overwhelmingly backs him. This backing
is evidence of his having taken over the party, able to brand traditional members
as Republicans in Name Only.
The pundits focus in the upcoming elections mainly on swing districts,
seats that may be captured as the result of gerrymandering and key Senate
races. His false assertions and distorted
historical memory may cost him, but perhaps the voters will forgive much if he
continues to slash the government. Later
the experts will decide if the results were a referendum on Trump.
In international relations, the referendum on Trump seems
already to be underway. If Ukraine must
accept a costly peace, it will largely be the result of the withdrawal of U.S.
backing, reflecting Trump’s admiration of Putin. He will also have crossed a worldwide redline
in threatening to annex Greenland.
He compounded his decline by his statement that NATO allies,
who supported the U.S. in Afghanistan after 9/11, stayed off the front
lines. That is simply false, and it has
enraged America’s closest friends. But
he might say, “they need us; we don’t need them.” That could prove to be a short-term view.
One advantage that he enjoys in the U.S. is the absence of
an appealing and comprehensive competing view.
Not only are the Democrats self-indulgently divided, but they leave the
role as their spokesperson to Sen. Chuck Schumer, clearly not up to the job. They offer little more than opposition to Trump. What is their alternative?
The world situation changed last week in a single speech at
the Davos economic festival. One person
made one statement, a kind of Declaration of Independence, that both made him the
star of the assembly and crystalized the alternative to succumbing to Trump,
Putin and Xi. This kind of statement is
precisely what is lacking in American domestic policy.
This speech was delivered by Mark Carney, the Prime Minister
of Canada. It is a policy statement
about how Canada is responding to Trump (not mentioned by name) and an
invitation for other countries to join. It prescribed the need for “middle” powers to
unify and diversify away from dependence on the U.S.
Carney’s speech demonstrated a quality sadly otherwise missing
in the world – leadership.
Here I share with readers the full text of the speech. At the end, I have provided a link to a
report that includes the 16-minute video of Carney delivering it. If you can take the time, I recommend that
you read or watch it.
The Carney speech (it began in French):
I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a
pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where
the large, main power, geopolitics, is submitted to no limits, no constraints.
On the other hand, I would like to tell you that the other
countries, especially intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless. They
have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, such as
respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and
territorial integrity of the various states.
The power of the less power starts with honesty.
It seems that every day we're reminded that we live in an
era of great power rivalry, that the rules based order is fading, that the
strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.
And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for
countries to go along to get along, to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope
that compliance will buy safety.
Well, it won't.
So, what are our options?
In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president,
wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless, and in it, he
asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?
And his answer began with a greengrocer.
Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window:
‘Workers of the world unite’. He doesn't believe it, no-one does, but he places
a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because
every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persist – not
through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in
rituals they privately know to be false.
Havel called this “living within a lie”.
The system's power comes not from its truth, but from
everyone's willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes
from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the
greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time
for companies and countries to take their signs down.
For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we
called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we
praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of
that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was
partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient,
that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international
law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the
victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in
particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial
system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the
rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and
reality.
This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in
the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance,
health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global
integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic
integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as
coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through
integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.
The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers
have relied – the WTO, the UN, the COP – the architecture, the very
architecture of collective problem solving are under threat. And as a result,
many countries are drawing the same conclusions that they must develop greater
strategic autonomy, in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply
chains.
And this impulse is understandable. A country that can't
feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself, has few options. When the rules no
longer protect you, you must protect yourself.
But let's be clear eyed about where this leads.
A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less
sustainable. And there is another truth. If great powers abandon even the
pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and
interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate.
Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships.
Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty.
They'll buy insurance, increase options in order to rebuild
sovereignty – sovereignty that was once grounded in rules, but will
increasingly be anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.
This room knows this is classic risk management. Risk
management comes at a price, but that cost of strategic autonomy, of
sovereignty can also be shared.
Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than
everyone building their own fortresses. Shared standards reduce fragmentations.
Complementarities are positive sum. And the question for middle powers like
Canada is not whether to adapt to the new reality – we must. The question is
whether we adapt by simply building higher walls, or whether we can do
something more ambitious.
Now Canada was amongst the first to hear the wake-up call,
leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture.
Canadians know that our old comfortable assumptions that our
geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and
security – that assumption is no longer valid. And our new approach rests on
what Alexander Stubb, the President of Finland, has termed “value-based
realism”.
Or, to put another way, we aim to be both principled and
pragmatic – principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty,
territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when
consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights, and pragmatic and
recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that
not every partner will share all of our values.
So, we're engaging broadly, strategically with open eyes. We
actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.
We are calibrating our relationships, so their depth
reflects our values, and we're prioritizing broad engagement to maximize our
influence, given and given the fluidity of the world at the moment, the risks
that this poses and the stakes for what comes next.
And we are no longer just relying on the strength of our
values, but also the value of our strength.
We are building that strength at home.
Since my government took office, we have cut taxes on
incomes, on capital gains and business investment. We have removed all federal
barriers to interprovincial trade. We are fast tracking a trillion dollars of
investments in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors and beyond.
We're doubling our defence spending by the end of this decade, and we're doing
so in ways that build our domestic industries.
And we are rapidly diversifying abroad. We have agreed a
comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU, including joining SAFE, the
European defence procurement arrangements. We have signed 12 other trade and
security deals on four continents in six months. The past few days, we've
concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar. We're negotiating
free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines and Mercosur.
We're doing something else. To help solve global problems,
we're pursuing variable geometry, in other words, different coalitions for
different issues based on common values and interests. So, on Ukraine, we're a
core member of the Coalition of the Willing and one of the largest per capita
contributors to its defence and security.
On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and
Denmark, and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland's future.
Our commitment to NATO's Article 5 is unwavering, so we're
working with our NATO allies, including the Nordic Baltic Gate, to further
secure the alliance's northern and western flanks, including through Canada's
unprecedented investments in over-the-horizon radar, in submarines, in aircraft
and boots on the ground, boots on the ice.
Canada strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland and calls for
focused talks to achieve our shared objectives of security and prosperity in
the Arctic.
On plurilateral trade, we're championing efforts to build a
bridge between the Trans Pacific Partnership and the European Union, which
would create a new trading bloc of 1.5 billion people. On critical minerals,
we're forming buyers’ clubs anchored in the G7 so the world can diversify away
from concentrated supply. And on AI, we're cooperating with like-minded
democracies to ensure that we won't ultimately be forced to choose between
hegemons and hyper-scalers.
This is not naive multilateralism, nor is it relying on
their institutions. It's building coalitions that work – issues by issue, with
partners who share enough common ground to act together.
In some cases, this will be the vast majority of nations.
What it's doing is creating a dense web of connections
across trade, investment, culture, on which we can draw for future challenges
and opportunities.
Argue, the middle powers must act together, because if we're
not at the table, we're on the menu.
But I'd also say that great powers, great powers can afford
for now to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity and
the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not.
But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we
negotiate from weakness. We accept what's offered. We compete with each other
to be the most accommodating.
This is not sovereignty. It's the performance of sovereignty
while accepting subordination. In a world of great power rivalry, the countries
in between have a choice – compete with each other for favour, or to combine to
create a third path with impact.
We shouldn't allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the
fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules will remain strong, if
we choose to wield them together – which brings me back to Havel.
What does it mean for middle powers to live the truth?
First, it means naming reality. Stop invoking rules-based
international order as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it
is – a system of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful
pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.
It means acting consistently, applying the same standards to
allies and rivals. When middle powers criticize economic intimidation from one
direction, but stay silent when it comes from another, we are keeping the sign
in the window.
It means building what we claim to believe in, rather than
waiting for the old order to be restored. It means creating institutions and
agreements that function as described. And it means reducing the leverage that
enables coercion – that's building a strong domestic economy. It should be
every government's immediate priority.
And diversification internationally is not just economic
prudence, it's a material foundation for honest foreign policy, because
countries earn the right to principled stands by reducing their vulnerability
to retaliation.
So Canada. Canada has what the world wants. We are an energy
superpower. We hold vast reserves of critical minerals. We have the most
educated population in the world. Our pension funds are amongst the world's
largest and most sophisticated investors. In other words, we have capital,
talent… we also have a government with immense fiscal capacity to act
decisively. And we have the values to which many others aspire.
Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public
square is loud, diverse and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability.
We are a stable and reliable partner in a world that is anything but.. A
partner that builds and values relationships for the long term.
And we have something else. We have a recognition of what's
happening and a determination to act accordingly. We understand that this
rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as
it is.
We are taking the sign out of the window. We know the old
order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy,
but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better,
stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that
have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine
cooperation.
The powerful have their power.
But we have something too – the capacity to stop pretending,
to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together.
That is Canada's path. We choose it openly and confidently,
and it is a path wide open to any country willing to take it with us. Thank you
very much.
Link
to report with video or copy this: https://ici.radio-canada.ca/rci/en/news/2222202/read-mark-carneys-full-speech-on-middle-powers-navigating-a-rapidly-changing-world
