As Donald Trump burns longstanding alliances, Canada thinks the unthinkable

The old order is gone and shouldn’t be mourned, Prime Minister Mark Carney says as President Donald Trump doubles down on his push to take over Greenland.

Prime Minister Mark Carney says the old “rules-based” international order, which allowed Canada to remain secure and prosperous for generations, is gone.

And while Carney told the crowd of international elites in Davos, Switzerland, that the old order should not be mourned, that doesn’t mean that Canada won’t feel its absence.

“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,” Carney said, without naming U.S. President Donald Trump.

One year into Trump’s second term in office, the Canadian government now appears to be thinking the unthinkable.

That the “rules-based” international order is collapsing — a collapse driven primarily by the United States, which for generations championed that order — will not come as news to the people of Venezuela, Greenland or Denmark.

But it’s noteworthy that it’s an opinion shared by the prime minister of Canada, given the two countries’ close security and economic ties.

The kind of subordination Carney was referring to was helpfully illustrated by a doctored image posted to social media by Trump early Tuesday morning, depicting European leaders in the Oval Office while Trump sits behind the Resolute Desk.

To Trump’s left was a map of the Americas, with Canada — along with Venezuela and Greenland — pictured with the stars and stripes of the American flag grafted over them.