POST-DAVOS 2026

Three people made speeches anyone will remember and for very different reasons. Frankly, Davos has been globally important for probably the first time ever. It was a milestone, a moment where current realities flowed together as one speech from Trump left us wondering if he was entirely on the same planet, another from Mark Carney showed impressive timing, exceptional cognisance and only someone with his economic and strategic policy experience could possibly have said it. That made it all the more resonant and it was seen by everyone as the speech that defined this event – and possibly will come to define the 2026-35 decade.

The final speech of value was President Zelensky’s. He both magnified Carney’s speech and used it to shake Europe out of its natural habit of seeing itself as powerless. His dig at Victor Orban and Europe’s willingness to tolerate his misbehavior while he takes its aid money wasn’t lost on anyone. Indeed he said many things that got him a standing ovation.

It’s rare for anything controversial to come out of Davos, let alone anything memorable. We’re all looking forward to the Munich Security Conference now because by then everyone will have had chance to absorb what’s been said and have a better idea of where they want to position themselves.

What was said is very much along the lines of what I’ve been saying all year. When I say it of course it’s not going to get the same audience, but it doesn’t mean it hasn’t been heard and the threads of my words and others drawn together. That’s part of the reason I go after all, to witter away in the background, talk to people, give my opinion and for them to give me theirs. My reputation is largely based on speaking truth to power, but you have to be able to tell when it wants to hear what you have to say and not just listen to it. And you have so very little time to talk to them about very complex issues. If you can get two minutes of a head of government’s time you’re doing well, if it gets extended you’re being heard. It takes a lot of reputation and the boosting of others to get that far.

What Mark Carney said delighted me.

We are in a geopolitical rift, what was is gone, what will come we can only surmise. What he laid out for Canada is what we need for all of Europe. Zelensky said, and I admired him for having the confidence as a soon to be EU member, that, while it appears to be a collection of small and medium powers, as a unified political force that stands together it is one of what we reluctantly call, Great Powers. If it works work with Canada, with Britain, with Norway, all key NATO members and allies of the EU in so many ways, especially in our values, then we need not be threatened or intimidated. Indeed the pushback over Greenland – for which Denmark is crediting the behind the scenes work of Britain and its government, along with Mark Rutte, then it could well have become far messier.

Mark Rutte went the extra mile and took a huge risk – its confused many, but what he did was defuse with the UK, a typical Trumpian offensive and bold demands, and headed them off at the pass. His past obsequiousness to Trump which unnerved a few, is a very much a humor thing hard to explain but it’s not what it appeared to be to those who don’t get irony, or sarcasm which in my experience is 80% of Americans. It gave him that edge – as did the calm reasoning from Keir Starmer and his team, to get Trump over the line and retracting his threats. Everything Trump wanted was available to him anyway without all of the demands and scare tactics. Existing treaties and willing partners simply had to show him – which makes you wonder quite how bad the CIA/NSC and State are these days when it comes to briefings, they must have known. I suspect they tried to say but were shot down by Steven Miller who wants the fight every time. Ignorance is bliss when it makes a right wing talking point.

We now have a real understanding that European leaders have to live with the rift in the world of geopolitics. The NATO alliance which Trump seems to think only he would honour – an extraordinary statement given his attitude and actions, and the rest of NATO’s behavior when America needed us after 9-11. NATO serves US interests, so it would never leave entirely, not that Congress would allow it. But America will minimize what it has to do until it’s a bare bones operation from their point of view. What they want is the bases and the over flights and the flexibility it gives them, while paying lip service to the organisation as a whole. They also want the weapons sales – don’t think that doesn’t matter.

What Europe absolutely must face is the deployment of UK-French tactical nuclear weapons because until the US can be asked to withdraw theirs, they will not give up the key position of SACEUR, and they will not put their own forces under a non-American, but I suspect by then they’ll largely have withdrawn their military contingents.

There’s so much we have to do. We have a chance to use the momentum of the Carney speech to get things in motion, to make changes, to seize the proverbial bull by the horns and tame it. It will take a team. I believe it can be done. If we can motivate Europe this year and next, just at the point Russian power collapses and cuts the support line for the right wing in Europe we have a chance. Even if the right wins in France and maybe in 2029 in the UK – it will be a very different and watered down right wing without the malice directed from Moscow. Indeed their relationships with it will prove to be deeply embarrassing. Even if Trumps lot try to peddle their influence – and they will – it won’t be as impactful because they’re so ignorant.

The world is changing fast. Russia’s defeat seems inevitable, not that they can see it. They may be talking peace again but it’s the same story it has been every time – they want whatever it is they demand today and Ukraine gets nothing. So there will be no peace and they will be defeated by their own hubris.

Trumps Board of Peace is just a massive scam and only idiots and toadies will join it. Who’s going to give Trump that much power that even out of office he gets to call the shots? They’re just currying favor with him until he’s off the scene. Is it any wonder the scammers, con men and corrupt are all the ones accepting? It was deeply amusing to see Putin accept as long as he could use frozen assets to pay the $1 billion club fees. Like one of those people dressed in a Saville Row suit and a grossly over the top Rolex in naff gold on his wrist, saying he left his Amex at home by mistake and could you order him an Uber. He’ll pay you back one day, he says, hoping you’ll never ask because he’s broke.

Strip away the rubbish and the short term thoughts. What Mark Carney said is the blueprint for the future. We all need to embrace it, it’s a moment in time that comes rarely. If Carney is willing to work on it and help make it happen, Canada will have come of age and be leading the Europe+ league to a new light. I hope he does so. It’s Canada’s time to shine in the free world like it has never done before.

MARK CARNEY’S SPEECH – I URGE YOU TO READ IT IN FULL

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 this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself. And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along, 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, the shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world unite.” He doesn’t believe in it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists — 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 varied 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.

he multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied — the WTO, the UN, the COP, the very architecture of collective problem-solving — are under threat. 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 cannot 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’s 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.

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 it 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 in 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 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 $1 trillion 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’ve agreed to 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.

In 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 Eight, 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 buyer’s clubs anchored in the G7 so the world can diversify away from concentrated supply. And on AI, we’re co-operating with like-minded democracies to ensure that we won’t ultimately be forced to choose between hegemons and hyperscalers.

This is not naïve multilateralism, nor is it relying on their institutions. It’s building coalitions that work issue 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.

Our view is 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 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 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 it 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 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 a 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 the most to gain from genuine co-operation.

The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, 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.

Are we ready?

The Analyst

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