Carney moved to reduce US reliance after Trump 51st-state pressure
Mark Carney swept to power on a backlash to President Trump’s talk of making Canada the 51st state, which many Americans took for mere shtick. But for the new prime minister, reading intelligence reports detailing the gravity of the crisis, it was a breaking point — and the beginning of a campaign to reshape the Western alliance, according to a Wall Street Journal investigation that drew on interviews with heads of government, ministers, senior aides, and detailed notes from closed-door meetings.
In private phone conversations with Carney’s predecessor, Justin Trudeau, Trump had threatened to scrap the 1908 agreement delineating the U.S.-Canada border, according to two people familiar with the matter. “I tear that up and your whole country unravels,” Trump told Trudeau in one call, the people said. Over dinner at Mar-a-Lago, when a Trump aide pointed out Canada’s 41 million people would lean Democrat, the president proposed splitting the country into two states — one red, one blue.
Since World War II, the alliance had worked like a wheel with the U.S. as the indispensable hub and the rest as spokes. Carney argued that Canada and Europe would have to build an alternative model — a “dense web of connections” that would not depend on any single country, according to people familiar with his thinking.
Carney drew on a network of European leaders he had known from the finance world, including Rothschild banker Emmanuel Macron, now France’s president; onetime chairman of BlackRock’s German subsidiary Friedrich Merz, now German chancellor; and European Investment Bank alumnus Alexander Stubb, now Finland’s president. Just two days after assuming office, Carney traveled to France rather than Washington — a break from convention for a new Canadian prime minister — and stood alongside Macron at the Élysée Palace, calling Canada “the most European of non-European countries.”
Over a private lunch, the two leaders exchanged ideas on how to reduce their reliance on America. French diplomats joked that because Canada and Denmark share a land border on an uninhabited Arctic island off Greenland, the North American country could be a candidate for fast-track EU membership, the Journal reported. Carney laughed.
The reception was more restrained in London. Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s administration had been startled when Trudeau’s government discreetly asked British intelligence chiefs to discuss how they might band together if the U.S. left the Five Eyes intelligence-sharing alliance, the Journal reported. MI6 turned them down, as the vast majority of intelligence came from Washington, and Carney did not try to resurface the idea, Canadian officials said.
At the G-20 in South Africa in November — which the U.S. boycotted — Carney found more common ground with Macron, Stubb, and Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez. Starmer remained cautious, telling Carney the West had to salvage its relationship with America. “We don’t have a relationship to keep!” Carney replied, according to officials in the conversation.
MSI previously reported that European leaders held emergency talks on breaking with America ahead of a secret meeting in Brussels in January that some participants called “therapy night” and marked as a point of no return.
White House spokeswoman Olivia Wales said, “President Trump believes Canada and all other NATO countries must take greater responsibility for their own defense.” Trump on Thursday posted an article about Canada’s economic difficulties on Truth Social with the annotation “51st State!”