PRIME MINISTER MARK CARNEY was scheduled to deliver a much-anticipated speech to the Munich Security Conference this past weekend. The mass-casualty shooting in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, changed that. Carney dispatched a senior delegation to Germany in his place—a crew that included Foreign Minister Anita Anand, Defence Minister David McGuinty, and Minister for AI and Digital Innovation Evan Solomon.
Understandable, given the circumstances, but unfortunate. MSC is where the world’s power brokers gather each February to take the temperature of global order. If there was ever a conference the prime minister needed to be at, it was this one. Why? Because organizers decided to confront head-on the realities of the changes to international relations brought on by the Donald Trump administration.
In this, it has to be said, they are following in the footsteps of the speech that Carney delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos on January 21. That speech talked about the global rupture caused by the Trump administration and suggested there was no going back. It urged avoidance of nostalgia and talked of a necessary reframing of international relations led by coalitions of middle and other powers. Carney missed the opportunity to reinforce that message, especially to his European counterparts, and to start to build some of the coalitions he talked about.
To set the stage for its conference, the MSC issued a conference report in advance of the gathering. This year’s version is entitled “Under Destruction” and features on the cover an elephant with, what I take to be, several gouges out of its hide. Maybe it’s limping as well.
Right off the bat, the report describes Trump as a “demolition man,” not unique in that role but, by far, the most consequential actor on the world stage. It suggests the United States, under Trump, has jettisoned the foundational understanding of how multilateral institutions and universal rules, open trade, and liberal democratic principles all served as strategic assets for the US. The Munich conference report finds a new order taking shape, what it calls a “neo-royalist” and “deals-based” order, characterized by the emergence of accepted spheres of influence, “private rent-seeking and distribution by involved actors” and “deal-making on a personalist basis.”