Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

May 04, 2026

An orange spectre is haunting Europe — the spectre of Trumpism. All the powers of old Europe have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Macron, Zelensky, Starmer, von der Leyen, and the quintessential non-European, Mark Carney.

The Davos faction is leaderless. Klaus Schwab stepped down in April 2025 under dark clouds — harassment allegations, financial impropriety, an internal investigation — and the World Economic Forum has no permanent successor until 2027. Before that, Henry Kissinger died. Not just Davos’s godfather, but the last figure in the Western power elite who could broker conversations between all Four Factions — Wall Street and Beijing, the Pentagon and Silicon Valley, Tel Aviv and Riyadh. His death didn’t weaken Davos specifically. It removed the circuit breaker between factions entirely.

Into that vacuum walked a Canadian.

Mark Carney’s appearance at the European Political Community summit in Yerevan this weekend was unprecedented — the first non-European leader invited to the table. He arrived into a Europe already in open confrontation with Washington: Trump uninvited and unwanted, accusing the EU of trade violations, threatening auto tariffs, and pulling troops from Germany in retaliation for European refusal to support the Iran war. German Chancellor Friedrich Merz said the quiet part loud: “The Americans clearly have no strategy.” The Atlantic alliance is breaking in ways that may not be repairable.

That is the arena Carney walked into, amidst proposals of a United States of Europe, and astonishingly, Canada is invited to join.

Alexander Stubb (Finnish President) publicly supports the idea of the US of Europe, labeled a potential Canada-EU union “a marriage made in heaven” and suggested it could be negotiated quickly.

As a brief segue, Dean Blundell, whose Substack covers Carney’s Yerevan trip as a pro-democracy victory, reads these same events as evidence of competent (Canadian) leadership triumphing over Trumpian chaos. He’s not wrong about the facts. But the question this piece is asking is different: not whether Carney is competent, but whose interests his competence serves, and what faction he’s serving them for.

The European Political Community summit was hosted in Yerevan, Armenia this year, the 8th biannual event, suggested by French President Macron after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. There were 44 heads of state invited. Russia and Belarus were deliberately excluded.

“We don’t think that we’re destined to submit to a more transactional, insular and brutal world, and gatherings such as these point to a better way forward,” Carney said on Monday, May 4 at the Yerevan Summit.

In a pointed suggestion that the era of American leadership was coming to an end, and explaining the symbolism of Canada’s attendance at a European political gathering, he said: “It is my strong personal view that the international order will be rebuilt, but it will be rebuilt out of Europe.”

Carney has his hands in nearly every Davos-aligned game. Carney isn't just a Davos-aligned politician — he's the first head of government whose entire pre-political career was spent inside the Davos institutional network:

Chair of Bloomberg L.P.
Vice Chair of Brookfield Asset Management
Co-chair of the World Bank's private sector investment lab
UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance
Foundation Board member of the World Economic Forum
Group of Thirty
Bilderberg attendee (2011, 2012, 2019)
Chair of the Financial Stability Board (2011–2018)
Chair of Chatham House
board member at Stripe
advisor to PIMCO
advisor at Peterson Institute for International Economics
Hoffman Institute at INSEAD
Watershed

Carney is the most well-positioned Davos Man in the globalist network, leveraging his connections to the fullest. Within months of taking office as Prime Minister, he concluded a CETA upgrade with the EU, a strategic partnership with China, deals with Qatar, restarted CEPA negotiations with India, and signed twelve trade and security deals across four continents in six months.

Carney is motivated to fulfill his middle-powers coalition plans. His travel pace is unusually high compared to his predecessors. In his first year, he spent 84 days either travelling or visiting other countries. This exceeds Justin Trudeau’s first-year total of 63 days of international travel and Stephen Harper’s first-year total of 34 days.

Carney’s extensive travel reflects a strategic shift in Canadian foreign policy. Key reasons include: Reducing dependence on the United States, especially under Donald Trump’s protectionist policies. Diversifying trade and security partnerships, with new agreements signed with the EU, UAE, India, Japan, and others.

Davos Project Reboot

Mark Carney, a card-carrying member of the First Faction — Davos — is realigning Canada as the leader in forming a coalition of the willing middle powers to act as a counter weight to the Second Faction Imperialists who have committed a ritual disruption of the rules-based order, and the Third Faction State Capitalists, primarily China and Russia, who are transitioning much of the world’s nations into a multipolar project.

Canada is the most important country on the planet. For now.

By retreating into a European geographical coalition, the Davos experiment is admitting defeat, or at the very least, attempting to build a consolation prize. Carney is attempting to reconstruct the Davos project at regional rather than global scale.

The Davos faction's universalist project required transcending the nation-state, but the strategic retreat into a European federation means adopting the form of the thing they spent thirty years arguing against. This is the most important admission of defeat in the framework's recent history. The WEF's stakeholder-capitalism universalism is being replaced by a specifically European civilizational project. That's not a tactical pivot; it's a confession that the universalist phase failed.

Carney announced at Yerevan another $270 million in military aid to Ukraine. This is in the wake of Carney’s military plan to invest half a trillion dollars into Canada’s military over the next decade, joining European Union’s Security Action for Europe (SAFE) and the new Defence, Security and Resilience Bank multilateral institution, the $32B Arctic modernization, and explicit pivot from US contractors to Canadian and European firms. This is not a defensive measure. This is the construction of the military-industrial backbone of the middle-powers coalition.

The Davos faction has always operated through financial and institutional architecture — it has never had coercive capacity of its own. Carney's defence investment isn't just security policy; it's the Davos faction acquiring a military-industrial base for the first time, anchored to European rather than American contractors.

For Trump's empire-expansion fantasy (51st state, Greenland), this is genuinely existential. If Canada becomes a EU defense-industrial partner, the geographic logic of American continental dominance breaks. The Arctic becomes a contested zone. Greenland becomes a Danish-EU problem rather than a bilateral US-Denmark issue. The "fortress North America" concept that some Imperial Nationalists have advanced becomes impossible.

The Pedestrian Class

Opposition Conservative Leader Pierre Poilievre, characterized Carney’s trip as “another trip, signing fake MOUs and giving dazzling speeches all while delivering no real results here at home.” Poilievre is caught between worlds, belonging to the pedestrian class of non-factional political actors, opposed to the Davos class, at odds with the Trumpian Imperialist faction due to Trump’s tariff war, threats of annexing Canada. Trump has shown little respect for Poilievre.

In early 2025, during the Canadian election race, when asked about Poilievre’s claim that “Canada will never be the 51st state,” Trump dismissed him, saying, “then maybe he won’t win. But maybe he will. Listen, I don’t care what he says.” This lack of recognition has weakened Poilievre’s standing, especially as Trump’s tariff threats and nationalist rhetoric have backfired politically in Canada.

Despite earlier alignment — such as Poilievre proposing energy exports to strengthen U.S.-Canada ties — Poilievre has since distanced himself, criticizing Trump’s policies as “chaotic” and “unreliable.”

In a world reorganized by the factional Capitalist Civil War, the non-factional political position becomes structurally incoherent. He can't align with Davos (ideologically incompatible), can't align with Imperial Nationalists (Trump doesn't respect him and the tariff war has poisoned the well), and Poilievre has no access to the other two factions. He's not just politically weak — he's a figure the new Four Faction world order has no place for.

Poilievre is arguably the first major political casualty of the Capitalist Civil War reorganizing political space in Canada, rather than simply an ineffective opposition leader. His only option is to continue building his populist base. In the absence of a faction to align with, Poilievre cannot aspire to occupy the Prime Minister’s seat if he has no coherent platform other than direct opposition to all Four Factions.

The European Political Community meeting in Yerevan is not a diplomatic summit — it's the first visible institutional expression of the Davos faction's post-universalist strategy. The Capitalist Civil War has produced its first new geography.

Welcome to the marriage made in heaven.

If you want Dean Blundell’s perspective: