Widmer: Carney's speeches build case for a west without the US

Trump dismisses EU-Canada plan as ‘laughable’ on social media

Widmer — a former White House speechwriter who edits the Library of America’s “American Speeches” and recently published “The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text” — published the essay Monday in The Guardian’s Comment is Free section under the headline “Mark Carney is making an eloquent case for an alliance sidelining the US.” He wrote that “the speeches keep coming, each building on the previous one, as the Canadian prime minister builds a case for a new world order that has strikingly little to do with the United States of America, the country that has led the west since the second world war.”

On January 20 in Davos, Carney proposed that the world’s middle powers do more to support each other in light of a “rupture” in the global order. Widmer described that reference as “clearly” aimed at the policies of Donald Trump, who had been inaugurated exactly one year earlier and had spent most of that year “insulting the US’s allies.”

On Thursday, before the European Parliament in Strasbourg, Carney delivered what Widmer called “another powerful oration that outlined what a new west might look like, without its most powerful member.” Carney “signaled his desire to build bridges across the Atlantic at a time when the US-Canadian relationship is badly strained over trade disputes and Donald Trump’s kindergarten taunts,” Widmer wrote.

The European Union has offered to make Canada an “associate member,” a status the bloc has no existing category for. Widmer wrote that it is “a depressing sign that the US’s historic allies are seeking new solutions for a world in which they can no longer trust the United States – for 80 years, the bulwark of the alliance.”

“That this was a blow to American prestige was immediately evident from Trump’s angry reaction on social media: he called the idea ‘laughable’ and threatened, as always, to impose more tariffs,” Widmer wrote. “That will only accelerate the growing trend to pay no attention to him.”

Carney opened the Strasbourg address in French, thanking his hosts, then moved into German to quote Goethe from Faust: “Nur der verdient sich Freiheit wie das Leben, der täglich sie erobern muß” — “Freedom and life must be earned every single day.” Carney applied the thought to specific 20th-century episodes, including the failed Hungarian revolution of 1956 — when, Widmer noted, “Russian tanks crushed a people’s dream of freedom” — and 1989, when the Berlin Wall came down and the Iron Curtain began to crumble.

Hungary, Widmer wrote, “remains on the front lines of freedom, having voted out the odious Viktor Orbán in April.” Carney also invoked the First World War, a conflict Widmer said Canadians remember more vividly than Americans do — Canada entered the war in 1914, three years earlier than the US, and suffered more casualties.

Carney recounted the story of a young Canadian soldier who gathered acorns from a French battlefield during the First World War and planted them in Ontario, where they grew into a “majestic forest.” Grafts from those oaks, Widmer wrote, are now being replanted at the original battlefield, completing “a profound circle of renewal.”

That language, Widmer observed, would be difficult to imagine in a speech by Trump, who “cut down a historic tree on the White House campus, paved the Rose Garden’s lawn, and generally avoids references to nature, unless they involve golf.” In 2018, 100 years after the First World War ended, Trump refused to visit a cemetery of US war dead during a trip to France, “out of concern that a helicopter flight would affect his hair,” Widmer wrote. The Atlantic reported at the time that Trump had also dismissed the US war dead as “suckers” and “losers.”

Carney went out of his way to say that the new EU-Canadian rapport “did not stem from a desire to ‘dominate others’ or seek to become a new great-power rival to those that already exist,” according to Widmer. Even as Carney expressed his values, Widmer wrote, “there was a tone of defiance.” Carney repeatedly stressed the issue of “sovereignty,” and “it was not difficult to draw the lesson that Canadians and Europeans remain aghast over Trump’s longstanding fixation on Greenland.” Canadians, Widmer wrote, are also furious over Trump’s repeated claim that he will make Canada — “a larger country than the United States” — the “51st state.” Carney delineated the reasons Europeans and Canadians want to draw together “so that no one can control our open markets, impair our sovereignty, threaten our territorial integrity or undermine our freedoms, our democracies, our rule of law.”

Widmer tied the address to other recent diplomatic friction. Trump has been badgering South Korea for assistance while scaling back US military support there, and “bizarrely claiming that North Korea, a far greater nuclear threat than Iran, is ‘unthreatening and respectful,’” Widmer wrote. South Korean President Lee Jae Myung announced on Friday that he would not send troops or military assets to support “Trump’s war of choice in Iran.”

Back in the United States, Widmer wrote, the war continues to drive up gas prices. That is in addition to the ongoing expenses created by “Trump’s endless tariffs, keenly felt in the very states that are closest to Canada.” Michigan, a battleground state where families now face the highest tariff burden in the US at $5,600 per household since the “golden age” began in January 2025, has been especially exposed to those costs.

“It is difficult to see how this ends well for the embattled president, making enemies at home and around the world, less than two months before the midterms,” Widmer wrote.