Opinion | Trump Broke The Old World Order, So Carney Flies To PM Modi

When a Canadian prime minister boards a plane to New Delhi, the most important question is not what he is flying towards. It is what he is flying away from

When a Canadian prime minister boards a plane to New Delhi, the most important question is not what he is flying towards. It is what he is flying away from.

Mark Carney touched down in Mumbai on February 27, arriving in India for a four-day visit that officials from both governments are already describing as potentially transformational.

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The agenda(s), a comprehensive economic partnership agreement, uranium supply deals, critical minerals, artificial intelligence, and defence cooperation, are ambitious enough on their own terms. The full significance of Carney’s presence in India, however, becomes legible only when read against a broader context: the systematic dismantling of the post-war trading architecture by the United States, and the profound strategic panic that has sent Ottawa searching, urgently and openly, for new anchors.

This is not primarily a story about India and Canada. It is a story about what happens to middle powers when the order they depended upon stops pretending to protect them.

‘WE ARE IN THE MIDST OF A RUPTURE’

Carney said it at Davos in January. Standing before the assembled leadership of the World Economic Forum (WEF), he declared that the world was experiencing “a rupture, not a transition".

The speech earned a standing ovation, rare by the forum’s usually restrained standards, and its central argument was worth the applause: great powers had begun using economic integration as a weapon, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, and supply chains as vulnerabilities to exploit. The multilateral institutions that middle powers had relied upon, the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and the Conference of the Parties, were not merely weakened; they were under direct, deliberate threat. Nostalgia, Carney told his audience, was not a strategy.

The source of the rupture requires no subtlety to name. Since returning to the White House, Donald Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs on Canadian goods, threatened the territorial sovereignty of a NATO ally, and pursued a transactional foreign policy that treats long-standing partnerships as liabilities to be........

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