All that time \u2014 from a period dominated by Richard Nixon, Leonid Brezhnev, and Mao Zedong to our own era \u2014 hardly anyone outside Davos was affected by, or even remembered a day later, any speech delivered in the town\u2019s Congress Centre. <\/p>\n
Get The Gavel<\/p>\n
A weekly SCOTUS explainer newsletter by columnist Kimberly Atkins Stohr.<\/p>\n
Then, four months ago, Mark Carney stepped to the podium and issued a rhetorical shot heard \u2019round the world.<\/p>\n
He spoke of the \u201crupture in the world order,\u201d and he argued that the middle of the third decade of the 21st century represented \u201cthe end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics, where the large, main power \u2026 is submitted to no limits, no constraints.\u201d And quoting Thucydides, he said that the world was witnessing the emergence of a period when \u201cthe strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.\u201d<\/p>\n
No one missed the reference, nor the target, nor even the new path forward the Canadian prime minister was offering to what he has come to call the \u201cmiddle powers\u201d of the world. One person was especially attentive to the Carney speech, and he issued a bitter rebuke that shook the conference. <\/p>\n
\u201cThey should be grateful to us, Canada,\u201d President Donald Trump told the gathering a day later. \u201cCanada lives because of the United States.\u201d<\/p>\n
Then he added: \u201cRemember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.\u201d<\/p>\n
Four months later, the world still remembers the statements that Mark Carney made.<\/p>\n
And since then, Carney has mounted something of a traveling salvation show, jetting to world capitals as an evangelist for his gospel of middle powers standing in the middle of a great movement for change \u2014 economically, culturally, and diplomatically. He\u2019s told Trump, a real-estate tycoon, that Canada isn\u2019t for sale and isn\u2019t vulnerable to a hostile takeover, and he has moved to reorient Canada\u2019s trade patterns away from the United States \u2014 a break with more than a century of established commercial relationships. <\/p>\n
Carney has made trips to China and India to seek fresh trade links with the growing economies of Asia; spurred investment deals with the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar; and repeatedly reached out to European governmental and business leaders.<\/p>\n
Trump may be the new sheriff on the world stage, but Carney is emerging as a quietly influential patrolman.<\/p>\n
For the last century, the role of moral leadership of the West has been occupied mostly by American presidents: Woodrow Wilson for his 14-points vision of a new world order; Franklin Roosevelt for his stewardship, along with Winston Churchill, of the endangered democracies in the Second World War; John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama for their idealism and evocative rhetoric, especially in their speeches in Berlin; and Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush for their star turns ending the Cold War and managing the fall of Communism, respectively.<\/p>\n
Now, as Kennedy might have said, the torch has been passed. (Kennedy, it\u2019s worth noting, borrowed that signature line of his inaugural address from a Canadian poet, John McCrae.) And it has been passed to a leader with the gray personality of the central banker Carney once was and the quiet defiance that comes with having been born in an enclave of 2,130 souls in the faraway Northwest Territories of Canada on a day when the temperature was minus 6 degrees.<\/p>\n
At a time when Trump has shattered the rules-based order that his predecessors built and have maintained since 1945 \u2014 and when the leaders of France, Great Britain, and Germany are facing turbulence of one kind or another \u2014 the Canadian prime minister has emerged as a new kind of international figure: a symbol of resistance to the United States and its president\u2019s tariff threats, the designer of a new political architecture, the constructor of a new set of trade relationships.<\/p>\n
That doesn\u2019t mean that Carney has won immediate success. Canada isn\u2019t a European nation. It won\u2019t be invited to join the European Union. And leaders across Europe have their own domestic problems that give them pause when an outsider enters the stage with a recitative from an unfamiliar libretto. <\/p>\n
But domestically, he has made real strides in consolidating power. In large measure because of his resistance to Trump\u2019s threats to make Canada the 51st state, he has prompted three Conservative members of Parliament in recent weeks to \u201ccross the floor\u201d \u2014 the Canadian phrase for switching parties. And as a result, he converted his year-old minority government in Ottawa to majority status.<\/p>\n
This represents a substantial enhancement of his power at a time when Canada is facing perhaps the greatest threat to its sovereignty and identity since the War of 1812 and the most robust swelling in nationalistic sentiment in its history.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe has a real opportunity to implement his agenda,\u201d says Andrew Enns of Canada\u2019s Leger public-opinion survey operation. \u201cHe\u2019s seen here very much as a credible shield and someone who will stand up to Trump at a time when Canadians are preoccupied with changing their relations with the United States.\u201d <\/p>\n