No. of Recommendations: 8
Mark Carney
What Trump hath wrought.
Most contemporary political speeches are terrible, flattened into pablum and crowd-pleasing safety, delivered by empty vessels, then forgotten within the hour. Yet the address from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a collected and poised former central bank head, will, we fear, be remembered for a long time. While he didn’t mention names, he did speak quite precisely of the recent “rupture” in the world order in which “great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” In other words, the great powers—such as the neighbor to which Canada’s economy has been deeply linked for decades—have begun to throw their weight around unreliably and turn on their own partners. That means it’s time for “middle powers,” like Canada or major European countries, to orbit around different suns, to diversify, and to work together outside the restraints of the broken American-led order. We encourage you to read it yourself. (Once you’re done with the Surge—no clicking away!)
This, in a nutshell, is the risk of Donald Trump. While it was good that Trump called off the dogs on a hostile takeover of Greenland—for the moment—in his own Davos address the next day, the damage was already done. You can only threaten NATO, threaten global institutions, threaten or implement tariffs, and threaten the sovereign territory of your allies so much before they’ll deem you an unreliable partner and begin to turn away. It’s just a rational response. Trump has a psychological need—wholly unfixable, at this point—to push buttons and wield power recklessly until it causes a stock market dip, at which point he walks it back. The stock market reverses, but the long-term damage to America’s brand doesn’t.
Slate's 'The Surge'.
