Aletho News

Davos, Mark Carney’s frankness, and the Euro-American rift

By Raphael Machado | Strategic Culture Foundation | January 29, 2026

One of the defining factors of the era beginning from the second half of the 20th century is the partnership between the USA and Europe – initially only Western Europe, eventually most of the old continent. But “partnership” is perhaps an imprecise term. The ideal term would probably be “occupation,” since, as defined by Lord Ismay, NATO was created to “keep the Americans in, the Soviets out, and the Germans down.”

In the meantime, Europeans grew accustomed to an automatic alignment with the USA, quite similar to that of Ibero-American countries during the same period, with the exception of the brief period when Charles de Gaulle distanced his country from NATO. Otherwise, the Atlantic Alliance gradually absorbed European countries.

The confusion is such that when speaking of “Western civilization,” most people think of Europe and the USA together, not only as expressions of the same civilization but as possessing identical fundamental and strategic interests. The Davos Forum or World Economic Forum can be thought of as the “celebration” of this civilizational alliance, an event bringing together political, economic, and societal leaders from around the world to discuss the priorities to be adopted in the coming years.

Historically, the USA and its representatives have always been prominent at the Davos Forum in all discussions, whether on environmental issues, the supposed need to censor the internet, or the social transformations considered necessary to deal with the 2020 pandemic crisis or future health crises. It was a space for consensus and planning among the North Atlantic elites.

However, Trump’s antagonistic stance towards the countries of the European Union inevitably significantly changed the atmosphere of Davos this time.

The pressures and demands for the cession of Greenland, including the threat of using military force, ultimately became the driving force of interactions among the elites. Naturally, at this moment, EU countries would not be capable of mounting significant military resistance to the USA in Greenland. But the increase in European military presence on the Danish-owned island seems to serve simply as the drawing of a red line.

And despite Mark Rutte rushing to try to find some sort of compromise with Trump on the Greenland issue, the reality is that Trump’s mere threat and pressure against his supposed allies was enough to leave scars. In other words, no matter how timid and cowardly current European leadership may be, to the point of yielding time and again, European distrust and ill-will towards the USA is still likely to increase.

Perhaps it is even necessary to look at other sectors besides the political summit. Among intellectuals, think tanks, journalists, and influencers, it seems easier to find tougher and more critical positions regarding the USA, as well as less willingness to reconcile, than among national political leaders.

“Anti-Americanism,” once a central plank for both nationalist and socialist parties in Europe but fallen into disuse after the Cold War, may end up becoming an important discursive topic again in this era of rising diverse populisms.

To a large extent, the speech by Mark Carney, Prime Minister of Canada, can be seen as a reasonable summary of the current geopolitical moment.

Throughout his speech in Davos, Carney emphasized that for decades, Canada and most Western countries remained aligned with the so-called “rules-based international order,” even considering it partly fictional; still, it was a useful and pleasant fiction. The other Western countries knew that these rules were not applied equally to all countries, and that stronger countries were practically exempt from most of their regulations. Everything in that order depended on who was the “accused” and who was the “accuser.” Different countries, engaged in the same actions, such as suppressing civilian protesters, for example, would receive different treatment depending on who their leaders and governments were: some would receive no more than a symbolic slap on the wrist, others would be bombed and have their heads of state executed in sham courts.

And these Western countries were satisfied as long as the bombed countries were African or Arab or, occasionally, some Slavic country like Serbia. This was because, for a few countries, that order allowed them to collect benefits in the form of capitalist extractivism.

Now, however, the international order has ended. It does not even survive as a farce – according to Carney himself. Faced with a series of crises, many countries began to perceive global integration more as an Achilles’ heel than as an advantage. Goods might have been cheaper, but what good is the theoretical availability of cheaper products when, in times of crisis, they become inaccessible, as during the health crisis. Or when sanctions simply make trade relations unviable for targeted countries.

For Carney, therefore, some countries have decided to transform themselves into fortresses, primarily concerned with ensuring their own energy, food, and military autonomy. And one of the basic consequences of this change is the decline of multilateral organizations. International courts, the WHO, the WTO, the World Bank, and various other bodies are increasingly ignored and disdained by regional powers – in the case of countries outside the “Atlantic axis,” because they consider the influence of the USA and its allies in these bodies too great; in the case of the USA, because, on the contrary, they consider that these bodies do not sufficiently serve US national interests.

This parallel and crosswise dissatisfaction is natural, to the extent that international institutions only ever served the USA and its hegemony insofar as that hegemony was the best tool for gradually constituting a “world government,” that “New World Order” proclaimed by George H. W. Bush.

The consequence of this process of collapse of globalist multilateralism is that international relations have come to be dominated by force. Most medium-power countries are not prepared to deal with this new and sudden reality. Moreover, it is naive to simply condemn the current situation and hope for a return to the “good old days” of a “rules-based” international order where the rules do not apply equally to everyone.

Carney also makes a suggestion for these medium-power countries to deal with the current international situation: strengthen bilateral relations with countries of similar mindset and orientation, building small coalitions of reasonably limited scope, aiming both to eliminate possible economic weaknesses and to enhance security mechanisms.

Naturally, Carney is specifically referring to strengthening Canada-EU relations, but, to some extent, we can also apply this kind of reflection to those counter-hegemonic or non-aligned countries that are not continental powers like Russia, China, and India. The case of Venezuela demonstrated that it is, in fact, necessary to be prepared to deal with US aggressiveness.

Countries like Brazil, despite its size and the importance given to it in international relations, lack nuclear weapons and sufficiently modern military forces to effectively protect itself against a focused and determined military action. Naturally, Brazil should seek to solve these deficiencies (and, indeed, the debate on “Brazilian nuclear weapons” has already begun in political, military, and social circles), but no significant change will be seen in the short term – which is why Brazil actually needs to develop other ways to guarantee its own security that do not depend on simple servility to the USA.

It would be fully in Brazil’s interests to lobby, within BRICS, for increasing the “security” dimension of the coalition. Still, we doubt that the current Brazilian administration has any interest in this, or even that it understands the need for such a radical transformation. In the absence of this initiative, at the very least, Brazil should seek to update its military, intelligence, and radar technology with the help of Russian-Chinese partnerships. But on a regional level, Brazil needs to strengthen its ties with other South American countries and begin, subtly, to try to attract them and remove them from the US orbit.

In short, the mere fact that we are discussing these needs, instead of naively betting that international forums created on Western initiative will be enough to defend us, already proves that we are already in a new and dangerous world.

January 29, 2026 - Posted by aletho | Economics, Militarism | Brazil, Canada, European Union, Latin America, United States