Canada’s Mark Carney Can’t Even Challenge American Hegemony Without American Help

Chris Bray

Canada’s brave new challenge to American military power requires American weapons and technical support.

Sometimes a punchline arrives a few weeks after the joke.

A little less than three weeks ago, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney made the globalist media swoon by standing on a stage in Davos and declaring the sudden new limits of American power. For years, Carney said, American hegemony was a stabilizing force in the world, so other countries tolerated America’s many failures to live up to its declared ideals — in Carney’s words, “the gaps between rhetoric and reality.”

But no more. In the age of a certain bad orange man, America has lost the trust of its erstwhile allies. “This bargain no longer works,” Carney announced. “Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” The time to end Canada’s reliance on American power has arrived, as an urgent strategic challenge that can’t be avoided. The world order has ruptured, and America’s out.

Pivoting away from America, Carney declared the coming emergence of a new security alliance, a coalition of “middle powers,” that would challenge an arrogant hegemon. Canada, the prime minister warned, had decided to “fundamentally shift our strategic posture,” aggressively changing policy “to build our strength at home.”