Mark Riley: Canadian PM Mark Carney preaches middle way as Trump pursues ‘might is right’ doctrine

It’s a fair bet that Mark Carney’s moment of clarity about Donald’s Trump’s view of the new world disorder came well before his compelling speech in Davos. Like many leaders, including Anthony Albanese, the Canadian Prime Minister most likely had a road to Kananaskis conversion. It was there at the G7 meeting in the Canadian Rockies in June last year that Trump began to show his firm hand on Iran. The President arrived late in a white MAGA hat and proceeded to suck the oxygen out of every room he entered with his insistence that the meeting’s joint communique should not call for a de-escalation between Iran and Israel. Having achieved that aim he then left early, cancelling planned one-on-one meetings with Albanese, India’s Narendra Modi and others. Trump came. Trump dictated terms. Trump left. The reason for his abrupt departure soon became clear when the White House posted images of him in the Situation Room, overseeing a shower of bunker-busting bombs over Iran. Trump hadn’t given the G7 leaders any warning of the impending action, just as he gave them no warning of his and Israel’s joint assault on Iran this time. But the way Trump was able to ride roughshod over the other leaders in Kananaskis obviously ground Carney’s gears. “There is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along,” he said in his Davos speech. “To accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety. “Well, it won’t.” He then delivered the killer line that continues to resonate loudly in intermediate nations around the world, including here. “Middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” It is a theme that Carney has expanded on during his Australian visit this week. He sees a new world order developing in which hegemonic powers are flexing their military muscles in the Middle East, on the fringes of Europe and throughout our region in the Asia-Pacific. It is a time in which the rules-based order, concepts of sovereign equality and innate assumptions of stability have been reduced to what Carney calls “a useful fiction”. He warns the world isn’t going through a period of transition. It is much more than that. The world is facing a rupture. Carney describes Canada and Australia as “strategic cousins”, facing shared challenges in this fracturing global landscape. He suggests the benefits of our long and close relationship should be exploited through collaboration rather than competition, working together with other like-minded middle powers as a foil to the hegemons. And when Carney talks of hegemons, he primarily means the US, China and to a lesser extent Russia. In his view of the post-rupture world, the Canadian Prime Minister sees trust as an asset that is almost as powerful as military might. The unspoken adjunct to this is that trust is also something that is too often missing in America’s relationship with its allies and partners. Carney has been more forthright than Albanese in his response to Trump’s return to hostilities in Iran. He, like Albanese, has welcomed the death of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. But Carney says the actions of the US and Israel in seeking regime change in Tehran breaks international law. Albanese, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles and Foreign Minister Penny Wong have all assiduously avoided such direct criticism. They’ve all said that the question of the campaign’s legality is one for the US and Israel to answer. Carney and other leaders, such as Britain’s Sir Keir Starmer and France’s Emmanuel Macron, regard the legal questions surrounding the Iran war as matters of lingering importance. The Canadian Prime Minister has warned that the rupture of the rules-based order has allowed the strongest to exempt themselves from the “inviolable” rules they impose on others. The implications of degrading that moral authority is easily lost in the immediate fire and fury of war. But the like-minded leaders are suggesting that the noble objective of destroying an existential and fundamentalist threat could be achieved without also destroying the established architecture of international governance. The middle powers are asking if there is a middle way between the tyranny of terrorism and the Trump view that might is always right. The White House’s answer at present is no. Mark Riley is the Seven Network’s political editor