Trump’s tariff retreat should lull nobody into dropping their guard. The EU must join forces with Canada, Japan and other like-minded countries

EU leaders would do well to meditate on the seminal lesson that the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, delivered at this year’s World Economic Forum.

In an incisive analysis of the new age of predatory great powers, where might is increasingly asserted as right, Carney not only accurately defined the coarsening of international relations as “a rupture, not a transition”. He also outlined how liberal democratic “middle powers” such as Canada – but also European countries – must build coalitions to counter coercion and defend as much as possible of the principles of territorial integrity, the rule of law, free trade, climate action and human rights. He spelled out a hedging strategy that Canada is already pursuing, diversifying its trade and supply chains and even opening its market to Chinese electric vehicles to counter Donald Trump’s tariffs on Canadian-made automobiles.

Paul Taylor is a senior visiting fellow at the European Policy Centre

The prime minister has a duty to be candid with the British public about the scale of the global realignment caused by a volatile US president

One foreign policy achievement that Donald Trump prefers not to boast about is his role in helping Mark Carney win last year’s Canadian general election. The incumbent Liberal party faced crushing defeat before Mr Trump threatened to annex Canada. Mr Carney’s candidacy was buoyed up by a patriotic rally against US bullying.

Perhaps because his country has also been coveted by Mr Trump, Mr Carney has given one of the most clear-sighted responses of any democratic leader to the US president’s designs on Greenland. Addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, the Canadian prime minister set out the challenge for countries whose security and prosperity have depended on a global system underwritten by the US.

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As Mark Carney, Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen decide ‘to live in truth’, what will it take for Starmer to call out Trump?

Donald Trump has told the Davos economic forum “without us, most countries would not even work”, but for the first time in decades, many western leaders have come to the opposite conclusion: they will function better without the US.

Individually and collectively, they have decided “to live in truth” – the phrase used by the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel and referenced by the Canadian prime minister, Mark Carney, in his widely praised speech at Davos on Tuesday. They will no longer pretend the US is a reliable ally, or even that the old western alliance exists.

In a rousing speech, Mark Carney made the case for unity in the face of Donald Trump’s new world order. We reproduce it here

Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics – where the large, main power, geopolitics – is submitted to no limits, no constraints.

On the other hand, I would like to tell you that the other countries, especially intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the various states.