Carney’s vision at Davos ignores the UN and smaller nations |
It was invigorating to see Prime Minister Mark Carney stand up to Donald Trump in Davos, even though Carney’s pithy speech — and the adulation it won in European capitals — left the U.S. president seething over sharing the spotlight with a mere central banker who’d never had to prove himself on reality TV.
Carney’s Davos speech was a clarion call for “middle powers” to join Canada in resisting the U.S. hegemon as it fully abandons the international rules-based order: “Middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”
Carney is correct: we should act together to resist the lawless, power-mad Trump.
However, in his enthusiasm for a middle-power alliance, Carney devoted little attention to the one forum that the world constructed — amid the ruins of the Second World War — specifically to deal with a ruthless megalomaniac with designs on other countries.
That is, of course, the United Nations, established when the world’s nations came together, in the aftermath of Hitler, to create a body to restrain aggressors and replace the ravages of war with peace and human development.
For all its flaws, the UN remains........