Let’s remember that before Donald Trump’s latest tilt at Greenland, he had also set his sights on annexing Panama and Canada, and had sent troops into Venezuela. Mexico has been in his sights, while he has also delighted in propping up like-minded autocrats in several Latin American states.
And yet no one appeared to be willing to call a halt to it all, terrified of offending the new emperor.
In a remarkable speech in Davos at last week’s World Economic Forum, Canada’s prime minister Mark Carney spoke through the fog of the conference’s usual diplomatic niceties of “a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality... 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.” The rules-based order is a pretence that the whole thing wasn’t fundamentally about American hegemony.
Many fellow middle-ranking powers have long chafed silently against an order they felt made some countries more equal than others, but which, all the while, they benefited from “American hegemony, in particular, [which] helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes”.
READ MORE
As Carney put it, “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.”
[ Trump’s Greenland pursuit is commercial not strategicOpens in new window ]
Carney’s attack on the Trumpian world order was an important public articulation of the new brutal reality. It was also accompanied by his insistence on the vital imperative of dissidence in an implicit, sharp rebuke to fellow leaders of western democracies for their role in allowing Trump to go unchallenged. He seemed to suggest they were effectively colluding with him, for fear of offending.
He invoked a parable from Vaclav Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless about a greengrocer who displays a “Workers of the world, unite!” sign in his shop window – not because he believes in its political message, but to live a “tranquil life”. Havel’s point is that when everybody pretends to consent and goes along with the lie, they sustain the system that oppresses them.
But the greengrocer – Carney and, he suggests, his unnamed fellow leaders – can, should and does take down the sign.
“By breaking the rules of the game,” Havel writes, “the greengrocer has disrupted the game. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living within a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked.”
Havel continues: “And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth.
“The power of the less powerful starts with honesty.”
Trump’s response is typical, with him still smarting because he hadn’t been given a Nobel Peace Prize, and thus no longer felt “an obligation to think purely of peace”. He immediately rescinded his invitation to Carney to join his Board for Peace, accusing the latter of “ingratitude”. “He wasn’t so grateful. They should be grateful to us, Canada. Canada lives because of the United States,” the US president declared. No room, however, for honest greengrocers on this Trump committee of autocrats, though Carney will not be disappointed.
Whether the middle-power states heed the Canadian prime minister’s warning of the new great-power dynamic in international relations and learn to stick together to stand up in something like a co-ordinated fashion to the bully, we will see. Still, it was refreshing to see Trump so publicly rebuked for casting aspersions on Nato troops’ willingness to fight. His retreat on Greenland also demonstrates that he is by no means invincible – in no small measure a reflection of the EU’s clear willingness to meet trade sanctions with strong countermeasures.
The EU owes Carney a debt of gratitude for his leadership. He should be heard. In a speech in Quebec City, Carney again rightly insisted that staying true to Canada’s values is key to maintaining its sovereignty: “We can show that another way is possible, that the arc of history isn’t destined to be warped toward authoritarianism and exclusion; it can still bend toward progress and justice.”
