U.S. President Donald Trump delivered a sharp rebuke to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Wednesday, responding to a sweeping foreign‑policy address Carney delivered at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Carney’s 40‑minute speech, delivered earlier in the day, argued that the post‑Cold War “rules‑based international order” has fractured beyond repair. He urged so‑called middle powers, including Canada, to stop “living within a lie” about the state of global governance and instead build new coalitions capable of resisting economic coercion from major powers.
“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 laid bare the risks of extreme global integration,” Carney said.
“More recently, great powers began 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. The multilateral institutions on which middle powers relied—the WTO, the UN, the COP—the architecture of collective problem-solving—are greatly diminished.”
Carney outlined a series of recent Canadian initiatives — from defence spending increases to new trade and security agreements — framing them as part of a broader shift toward what he called “values‑based realism.”
Speaking on Wednesday, Trump did not reference specific passages from Carney’s speech, but his remark suggested frustration with Carney’s assertion that the United States, like other major powers, has increasingly used economic integration as leverage.
“Canada gets a lot of freebies from us, by the way,” Trump said. “They should be grateful, also, but they’re not. I watched your prime minister [Tuesday], he wasn’t so grateful. But they should be grateful to us.
“Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, next time you make your statements,” concluded Trump.
Carney also argued that middle powers must stop pretending the old order still functions and instead build new frameworks that reflect current realities. He said Canada is “taking the sign out of the window” and acting accordingly.
“Middle powers must act together because if you are not at the table, you are on the menu. Great powers can afford 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,” Carney said.
“We accept what is offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination. In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: to compete with each other for favour or to combine to create a third path with impact. We should not 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.”
Trump has repeatedly emphasized U.S. primacy in global affairs and has criticized allies he believes benefit disproportionately from American security and economic power.
The U.S. President has escalated his threat to annex Greenland in recent days, leaving many of America’s closest allies warning that a takeover would shatter the NATO alliance. Earlier Tuesday, the president posted an AI-generated photo of himself meeting with European leaders in the Oval Office, next to a map of the Western Hemisphere. American flags covered Greenland, Canada, Cuba and Venezuela on the map.
Last Saturday, Trump threatened in another post that he would impose a 10 per cent import tax on eight European nations refusing to support his planned Greenland takeover. The rate would jump to 25 per cent in June, he said, if there was no takeover deal in place.
With files from The Canadian Press