Not for all the Somalians in Iceland

Trump's was barely a speech. Carney's was only a speech. Thoughts on two days at Davos

Apparently I posted the text of Mark Carney’s Davos speech before anybody else did, so yesterday was a good day here at the Paul Wells newsletter. Welcome, surprisingly large cohort of new subscribers! I feel I should warn you this is not a Mark Carney fan-fic site. Or not usually. Or not only.

I decided to wait until today to write my own thoughts about Carney’s speech. This meant I could also catch Donald Trump’s own remarks to the World Economic Forum in the Swiss mountains.

(I surveyed all that’s problematic about the World Economic Forum in general in this 2022 post. There’s plenty to dislike about the crowds it routinely draws. I’ve never attended, but neither do I find the notion of boycotting it useful. It’s a conference.)

The Trump and Carney speeches are hard to compare. In the end I’ll mostly talk about Carney. Trump’s was less of a coherent argument. That’s to be expected, but the surprise was that it was less about being in Davos and speaking to a largely European crowd of decision-makers than I had expected. It was less of an ordered and direct confrontation with contemporary European governments than JD Vance’s 2025 speech to the Munich Security Conference, which I picked apart with Le Monde columnist Sylvie Kauffmann here. And it wasn’t really a walking, talking summary of Trump’s national security strategy. It was mostly an off-the-rack Trump stump speech.

The big news was that he said he won’t use force to take Greenland. Secondary headlines: he repeatedly confused Greenland and Iceland, for the second day in a row; and that he thought “Somalians” would have been too “low-IQ” to organize social-service fraud in Minnesota, for the second day in a row. (The fraud did happen, on a bewildering scale, for a long time, in ways that are fascinating to read about, but of course that doesn’t come close to justifying blanket insults at an entire community, or sending thousands of armed masked thugs in.)

That’s Trump. I had promised thoughts on Carney’s speech. Here are a few.

First, the response to the speech has been remarkable. Yesterday’s post, which contained only the text of a highly public speech, drew five times as many views as anything else I’ve ever posted here. Many people described the speech as historic. Never-Trump Republican Steve Schmidt appointed Carney “the leader of the free world.” UK Labour veteran Alastair Campbell, whose old boss Tony Blair used to deliver three or four good speeches a week, called this one “one of the best — and most important — of recent times.”

I’m mostly going to spend the rest of this post saying the speech wasn’t all that, but in some ways I’m outvoted. It’s the easiest thing in the world to ignore a speech. This one was spontaneously taken seriously by a very large number of people.

I’m also pleased whenever anyone rehabilitates the embattled notion that it’s good for politicians to explain what they’re up to. Politicians, including whichever ones you personally like, are increasingly reluctant to hit pause and discuss the thinking behind their action. Two of the most stubborn tenets of modern communications — “If you’re explaining, you’re losing,” and the notion that leaders should speak only to make announcements, have led to a contemporary landscape in which the “Here’s what I’m thinking” speech is increasingly rare. Even the normally dependable CJ Cregg fell for the “only announcements” canard in West Wing Season 5, Episode 12, “Slow News Day:”

So it’s good that the Prime Minister of Canada made a speech. Everyone should give more speeches. And Carney’s speech said some real things. Let’s go through those.

First, he dismissed odes to the “rules-based international order,” which were constant under Justin Trudeau and which, as it happens, I had complained about only two days earlier. “Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics laid bare the risks of extreme global integration,” he said.

More recently, global integration — everyone trying to do everything together — became not just risky, but weaponized by bad-faith actors. “Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” This is Xi’s China, Putin’s Russia, Trump’s US, especially Trump II — although, significantly in a speech that lauds truth-telling at least four times, Carney named none of them.

In the face of these risks and bad actors, everyone is tempted to retreat into their own fortress, although, come to think of it, not everyone should: “Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortress.” Who’s to make these collective investments? Whoever wants to and broadly fits, a list that will change from one file to another: “variable geometry” without too-high entry bars into any given club-of-circumstance because “progress is often incremental… interests diverge, [and] not every partner shares our values.”

The alternative is what I’m tempted to call Starmerism: “When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what is offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.”

That’s the argument. I’ve stripped it of most of its applause lines — if you’re not at the table you’re on the menu, the world as it is vs. the world we wish, and so on. All those applause lines, and indeed every part of the speech, was stuff keen students of Carney’s public pronouncements have heard before. That’s not a dig, it’s inevitable. It’s simply impossible to say only new things in a speech, and if a leader, skilled or not, has any kind of consistency, he’ll mostly keep saying the same things in different ways. Still, it was weird to watch the newbies freaking out: Oh my God, he said Canada has what the world needs!

In particular, I’ll be surprised if the people who took the speech as an announcement that Carney or Canada are now in the business of unmasking Donald Trump turn out to be right. There will still be days when Carney’s awfully accommodating toward Trump. And others when he doesn’t have say much about the guy either way. I think Carney’s been consistent: Trump is a feature of the landscape, he’ll remain so, and Canada is not about to move away from its spot next to the United States. But because, as Carney was already saying 10 months ago, “the United States is no longer a reliable partner,” Canada must “pivot our trade relationships elsewhere” and “make ourselves more productive and therefore more competitive.”

There simply aren’t a lot of keys on this kalimba. Live with the Americans, to the extent possible; build Canada’s internal market; seek new allies and markets elsewhere. The devil’s in the details, and all the work lies ahead. This anticipates the obvious critique of Carney’s speech: that it doesn’t solve a single problem or put a meal on a table. That’s true. Speeches aren’t good for that. They’re good for other things. Onward to the next speech, and all the work.