Ted Widmer, writing in The Guardian:
The speeches keep coming, each building on the previous one, as the Canadian prime minister builds a case for a new world order that has strikingly little to do with the United States of America, the country that has led the west since the second world war.
On 20 January, in Davos, Mark Carney proposed that the world’s middle powers do more to support each other, in light of a “rupture” in the global order. That was clearly a reference to the destabilizing policies of Donald Trump, who had been inaugurated exactly one year earlier, and had spent most of that year insulting the US’s allies.
On Thursday, before the European parliament in Strasbourg, Carney delivered another powerful oration that outlined what a new west might look like, without its most powerful member. In his speech, Carney signalled his desire to build bridges across the Atlantic at a time when the US-Canadian relationship is badly strained over trade disputes and Donald Trump’s kindergarten taunts. The EU has offered to make Canada an “associate member”, and while it is unclear what that means (the EU has no such category), it’s a depressing sign that the US’s historic allies are seeking new solutions for a world in which they can no longer trust the United States – for 80 years, the bulwark of the alliance…