Photo by Lara Jameson on Pexels
By Mark Kenny
A version of this article was originally published by The Canberra Times.
Mette Freideriksen signed the visitor's book at Chequers, Keir Starmer's official country residence on Thursday, with the words, "We'll get by with a little help from our friends".
The Prime Minister of Denmark - a NATO member-state whose autonomous territory of Greenland is the apple of Donald Trump's eye - had cause to be light-hearted.
Freideriksen's UK visit came just after the TACO president (Trump Always Chickens Out) had rolled up in Davos and promptly retreated from his bellicose threats to seize Greenland militarily and to penalise selected European governments with new tariffs for their insolence.
Trump says he now has a better plan for American security interests in Greenland although saving face is a more credible priority.
It had been a tawdry affair with Trump's sabre-rattling accompanied by juvenile social media posts replete with AI-altered maps depicting the Stars and Stripes territory extending south from Greenland, through Canada, the US, Mexico and Venezuela.
In an infantile rant to the Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store, Trump justified his planned annexation of Danish territory via SMS: "Dear Jonas: Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace."
Needless to say, the government of Norway controls neither Greenland, nor the Nobel Committee.
At no time since the Second World War, has a Western leader, much less a US Commander-in-Chief with unrivalled firepower at his fingertips, promised such imminent lethal force against democratic partners.
While Trump has normalised such outrages, he has had help from mute world leaders terrified at being singled out for punishment.
What they consider prudent diplomacy has become enabling silence, effectively encouraging a narcissistic strongman to feel no constraints, and suffer no opprobrium, no matter what standard is abused.
At Davos, perhaps, that changed with a stirring call from Canada's Mark Carney for a new era of collective middle-power confidence and coordination - or as he called it, "the power of the less powerful".
This, according to the Prime Minister's optimistic formula, starts with a new frankness from middle-tier countries such as Canada, Australia and those in Europe.
"Stop invoking rules-based international order," Carney - a former central banker, told his more experienced confreres.
"Call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as coercion."
Like most courageous interventions, Carney's words didn't merely draw attention to his reasoning. They hung a bright lantern over the cowardice of leaders should who have pushed back over recent years as Trump went increasingly rogue.
This low-conflict heads-down response drew Carney's particular ire as he condemned those who habitually "go along to get along".
"For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability," he said.
"We knew the story ... was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
"This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So we ... participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality."
Clearly, in Carney's estimation, that gap has become too wide to rhetorically bridge. Worse, pretending otherwise has the perverse effect of validating ever bigger affronts to the so-called order while leaving it notionally in place. Think Venezuela.
Carney says what was an already imperfect bargain no longer works because the scale and nature of the contradictions constitute "a rupture, not a transition". Think trade penalties.
"...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."
Ouch!
Carney's speech has been widely hailed as a landmark address, if only because it put on the public record what many knew but had refused to articulate.
Treasurer Jim Chalmers, who has come closest to Carney's cerebral perspective in past speeches and essays, called it "stunning" and revealed it has been widely shared within the government.
Yet a more formal and systematic Australian response is called for.
An immediate test for Anthony Albanese is Trump's invitation to sit on the new "Board of Peace" which will have as its top priority the task of developing Gaza. Also invited, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu.
Doing so would undermine the UN, compromise Australian independence, contravene Labor's longstanding policy of a two-state solution, and functionally reverse Australia's formal recognition of a future Palestinian state.
What Albanese decides on this invitation will be a strong pointer to his thinking on the deeper issues framed so brilliantly by the Canadian PM.
Carney, by the way, has since been disinvited from Trump's Board of Peace.
A badge of honour, I'd say.
Mark Kenny is the Director of the ANU Australian Studies Institute and host of the Democracy Sausage podcast.