Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a pointed critique of Donald Trump while speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as tension between Trump and America’s allies intensifies amid the president’s push to take control of Greenland.
“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” Carney said on Tuesday. “Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”
Carney’s speech comes days after Trump announced a new round of tariffs against several of America’s European allies in an effort to force them to support his bid to annex Greenland, a territory of Denmark. Trump has meanwhile bashed NATO, even sharing a social media post on Tuesday alleging that the alliance of nations is a greater threat to the United States than Russia or China. The president has also recently shared memes depicting him planting the American flag on Greenland and of him and world leaders in the Oval Office next to a map with the American flag plastered over both Canada and Greenland. Trump on Sunday sent Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre a letter in which he suggested he could take Greenland by force in response to not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize.
“We stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland’s future,” Carney said to applause, adding that Canada “strongly opposes” tariffs over Greenland. Canada, like other nations, is moving to diversify its economic ties amid Trump’s erratic tariff agenda, signing a deal with China for low-cost electric vehicles last week. The European Union on Thursday stopped the approval of a trade deal it struck with the United States last summer.
Trump’s allies in government have repeatedly touted the need for the United States to dominate the Western Hemisphere, particularly in the wake of the U.S. military capturing Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro earlier this month, effectively putting the U.S. in charge of the South American nation. (Trump even shared a social media post identifying him as the “Acting President of Venezuela.”) The administration’s attention quickly shifted to Greenland, and Canada is right to be worried — about what it could mean for NATO as well as the nation’s own sovereignty. Trump has frequently suggested that Canada become the “51st state,” and given the imperialistic moves Trump has already made this year it would be foolish to dismiss the possibility that he could have real designs on America’s neighbor to the north.
The Globe and Mail reported on Tuesday that the “Canadian Armed Forces have modeled a hypothetical U.S. military invasion of Canada and the country’s potential response,” citing two senior government officials. The officials said it was unlikely that Trump would order such an invasion, but that if it were to happen, “the military envisions unconventional warfare in which small groups of irregular military or armed civilians would resort to ambushes, sabotage, drone warfare, or hit-and-run tactics.”
The Globe and Mail reported earlier this week that Canada is considering sending troops to Greenland as a show of solidarity with Denmark, and Carney said in Davos that Canada is working with NATO allies to help secure the alliance’s northern and western flanks, including through “boots on the ground, boots on the ice.”
Carney wasn’t the only world leader to level a barely veiled criticism of Trump at the World Economic Forum. French President Emmanuel Macron spoke on Tuesday of a “world without rules, where international law is trampled underfoot, and where the only laws that seem to matter are of the strongest, and where imperial ambitions are resurfacing.” Macron referenced Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine and conflict in the Middle East and Africa, as well as America’s trade wars, noting that Trump’s tariffs are “fundamentally unacceptable, especially when they are used as leverage against territorial sovereignty.”
“We prefer science to conspiracy theories, rule of law to rule of force, dialogue to threats,” Macron added later on X, echoing comments from his speech.
Trump spoke at White House on Tuesday to commemorate the anniversary of his return to the White House last January, and again he took a jab at NATO. “NATO has to treat us fairly,” he said. “The big fear I have with NATO is that we spend tremendous amounts of money with NATO. I know we’ll come to their rescue, but I really do question whether they’ll come to ours. I’m just saying.”
Trump added later that he “lost a lot of respect for Norway” because he didn’t win the Nobel Peace Prize after he “settled eight wars,” which he says was “easy.” When asked how far he is willing to go to acquire Greenland, Trump responded, “You’ll find out.”
Trump spoke today at Davos, reiterating his belief that America needs to control Greenland while claiming he won’t use force to take the Danish territory, which he referred to as “Iceland” multiple times during the speech. “So we want a piece of ice for world protection, and they won’t give it,” the president lamented, threatening to “remember” if Denmark doesn’t let the U.S. take control of Greenland.
Trump also took a jab at Carney. “Canada gets a lot of freebies from us. They should be grateful also but they’re not,” he said of Canada. “I watched your prime minister yesterday, he wasn’t so grateful. But they should be grateful to us. Canada lives because of the United States. Remember that, Mark, the next time you make your statements.”
This story was originally published by Rolling Stone US on Jan. 21, 2026.
The first day of the 2026 Republican National Convention at the American Airlines Center, on Sept. 9, 2026 in Dallas, Texas.
People of all colors listen as Donald Trump speaks on the first day of the Republican midterm convention.
Trump supporters at the Republican midterm convention.
Apple Maps, August 30, 2026
It’s Been 25 Years Since 9/11. Did the Terrorists Win?
I once had a conversation with Barack Obama about the nature of terrorism. This was during his second term, and he’d been going on for a few minutes about how Islamic terrorism wasn’t actually an existential threat to Americans, but rather a chronic and manageable risk. I was all too familiar with this argument, having conducted the interview with John Kerry in 2004, in which he said terrorism could be reduced to the level of a “nuisance” — a quote that blew up on him during the final weeks of the campaign. I found Kerry’s answer problematic then, and I had the same reaction when Obama said it. I asked him pointedly: What would have to happen for him to decide that terrorism was, in fact, existential? How about a suitcase nuke on a subway car? Then would he concede that terrorists were more than criminal gangs?
Obama didn’t hesitate. Terrorism would only reach the level of an existential threat, he told me, if Americans responded by abandoning their own values and turning on one another. There was nothing a bunch of homicidal zealots could do to destroy the most powerful country on Earth, but we could certainly destroy ourselves if we abandoned our constitutional protections in a fit of panic.
At the time, this struck me as something you might expect to hear from a constitutional-law professor, but not necessarily from the president of the United States. There was an intellectual fatalism about Obama I sometimes found disconcerting — a sense that he saw himself as a twig in the river of history, and it was up to the rest of us to change the current. I doubt he would dispute that assessment. But I thought often of that conversation a few years later, as the country careened into the Trump era. And as we pause now to reflect on the 25 years that have passed since the attacks of Sept. 11, I find myself thinking about it again.
Alternative histories are a tricky business, best left to novelists and sci-fi filmmakers. As a friend of mine in politics likes to say, mockingly, whenever such theories get floated: What if Hitler had won the Civil War? And yet, it’s hard not to see a direct line between the events of 2001 and where we are today — and to wonder how different the country might have looked had it never happened. On the eve of the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, George W. Bush’s young presidency seemed to be wobbling. Absent those attacks, he might well have been a one-term president, and he almost certainly would not have invaded Iraq. Nor would Democrats become backed into defending the entrenched war in Afghanistan as the “good war” — a way of differentiating their own response to 9/11 from Bush’s without sounding reflexively pacifist.
Without the economic shock of 2001, it’s unlikely that desperate policymakers would have looked the other way while lenders, underwritten by the government, turned the housing market into a casino, leading to the second massive blow of the decade: the market collapse of 2008. All of these things, in quick succession, destroyed what remained of the public’s faith in its governing establishment, leading directly to Obama’s stunning takeover of the Democratic Party and, later, to the election of Donald Trump.
The Trump I met in the late 1990s, while he was flirting with an independent run for president, held himself out as a centrist reformer, in the mold of Ross Perot. By 2015, when he started running as a Republican, Trump had fully embraced a reactionary, white-nationalist movement — a response to Obama, yes, but also to Bush, whose instinct in the months after 9/11 had been to speak out forcefully in defense of Muslim Americans, and whose support for liberalized immigration infuriated much of his party’s base. Trump’s core appeal then, as it is now, was rooted firmly in the nativist, anti-globalist backlash that emerged in 2001. (According to Pew Research, roughly 42 percent of Americans believe Muslims are having a negative impact on the country.) The animating idea of Trump’s second term is that white, English-speaking Americans are the only authentic Americans. It shouldn’t be controversial to say that he will twist or shred any page of the Constitution to enact this vision, since he really makes no effort to conceal it.
Nor is America’s hard turn away from pluralism and liberal democracy happening in a vacuum — far from it. In the past decade, similarly reactionary, anti-immigrant movements have rocked Britain and taken over Italy, and they now seem poised to wrest power in France and Germany. Maybe some of this would have happened without 9/11; the hollowing-out forces of globalization and automation were already fueling plenty of economic fury here and in Europe by the turn of the century, and the revolution in social media wasn’t far off. But there’s little doubt that the “War on Terror,” which became the first real foreign policy framework since the end of the Cold War, focused all of that anxiety toward an identifiable enemy, fracturing societies that had been held together by a 50-year consensus around personal liberties. If Obama were being honest, he’d probably say he told me so, and he’d be right.
IN THE MONTHS after 9/11 and before the invasion of Iraq, it was hard to get much perspective, and genuine patriotism mixed — as it always does — with a series of mindless gestures and clichés. Flag pins became mandatory even for reporters, peace songs were effectively banned, Republicans brought “freedom fries” and “freedom toast” into the lexicon to protest French misgivings about war. It became rote for politicians to say that the terrorists hated our way of life and we would never let them win. (To this day, when my dog snarls at some terrified Shiba Inu for no reason, I ask her why she hates freedom.)
Twenty-five years on, though, with the benefit of distance and experience, we can ask some questions we couldn’t ask then. And one of them is what the violent extremists who sent those suicide planes into our buildings really hoped to achieve. Did Osama bin Laden think he could win a holy war with America? Did we ultimately frustrate his script for the downfall of the West, or did we simply play our part?
Terrorism is, by its nature, asymmetrical. Whether it’s the Viet Minh under the French, or the IRA in Britain, or Al Qaeda, there’s an inherent understanding that the terrorist can’t win a conventional war against an obviously superior military force. What the terrorist seeks is destabilization of the status quo. His desperate act is an igniter in search of fuses; the goal is to set off a chain reaction inside the fortress that can’t be controlled, to disrupt order with chaos and see what shakes out. The terrorist knows this will likely cause his own people suffering in the short run, but that’s part of the point. He believes the occupier to be a soulless monster, and by reducing it to its basest instincts, he hopes to bare its nature to the world.
We’re seeing this play out, in real time, in Israel. The leaders of Hamas, their military options exhausted and their political goals slipping away, could not have been under any illusion that they would drive out the Israeli occupiers by savagely killing and mutilating more than a thousand innocent people. They must have hoped that Israel would react with blind fury and cruelty, resorting to the instinct for all-out annihilation that its leaders had long managed to suppress. Nearly three years later, Israel has tumbled from legitimatized power to international pariah, its politics riven by disunity, its moral authority in shambles. Do we think Hamas really cares that more than 70,000 of its own people have died in the carnage? Its repugnant leaders almost certainly consider that a cost worth paying in the broader context of history. What they have achieved, in political terms, has exceeded their most feverish dreams.
The Israelis should have looked across the Atlantic and learned something from our own experience. America on Sept. 10, 2001, was an unchallenged superpower at peace — vexed by social and economic divisions, yes, but still stable enough to survive a disputed election with its political consensus intact. A quarter century later, we find ourselves fighting a third unsuccessful war in the Middle East, our society more divided and our politics more poisoned than any time since the 1800s, a foundation of laws imperiled after 250 years of durability, immigrants hunted down like animals by masked agents, violence and extremism on the rise from both right and left, truth and intellectualism in retreat. This is not solely the fallout from Sept. 11, 2001, but it is the result of a series of events that, were you able to hit a rewind button and live it all again in reverse, would lead you directly back to that day. If bin Laden meant for his attack to be the first in a series of similarly epic crimes, then he was soundly defeated — no small achievement for American soldiers and spies. But if his goal was to destabilize America and bring out the worst of our nature, then he may have pulled off the most successful terrorist attack in history.
Over and over we told ourselves, in that agonizing moment, that the terrorists would never win. A quarter century later, it’s getting hard to argue they didn’t.