It appears that a sense of calm has returned, as President Trump has retreated from his previous stance. Initially, he was adamant that acquiring Greenland was crucial for U.S. security and even threatened tariffs against nations opposing this view. However, he eventually stepped back from this position.

After a series of predictable criticisms aimed at America’s steadfast allies, while remaining silent on its adversaries, Trump and NATO reached an agreement at Davos. The focus was on enhancing security in Greenland and the Arctic region.

The agreement reached did not introduce any new proposals that had not been available before Trump’s forceful rhetoric. According to NATO Secretary-General Marc Rutte, the topic of U.S. sovereignty over Greenland was never even discussed during negotiations with Trump. The situation seemed to be more bark than bite.

NATO’s European members are understandably relieved. The immediate threat has been averted, as NATO could not endure one member forcibly annexing another’s territory. For the moment, that particular risk has subsided, though the potential for future unpredictability remains.

Nonetheless, the more astute European allies recognize that this incident marks a turning point in global affairs. They understand that returning to the status quo is not an option, as this event signifies a significant shift in international relations.

But the wiser Nato allies in Europe know there can be no return to business as usual – that we’ve reached a watershed in global politics.

That the Atlantic Alliance will never be the same again. That America under Trump must be now be regarded as an unreliable and capricious ally — and at times (Ukraine, Greenland, tariffs) to behave as an enemy. That European Nato, along with Canada, has no time to waste in preparing for a new world order in which they no longer depend for security on the USA.

Donald Trump marched his ego to the top of the hill then marched it down again. After insisting that the annexation of Greenland was essential to American security… he backed off

Mark Carney put this best and bluntly in the speech of Davos 2026. It’s not often a Canadian prime minister identifies a seminal change in world politics then charts a path for dealing with it

Mark Carney put this best and bluntly in the speech of Davos 2026. It’s not often a Canadian prime minister identifies a seminal change in world politics then charts a path for dealing with it. But that is precisely what this former governor of the Bank of England did this week.

‘The old order is not coming back,’ he told the World Economic Forum, a gathering of globalists who’ve done especially well out of the old order. ‘We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.’

He proceeded with some very uncomfortable truths for a WEF audience. ‘Over the past two decades,’ he explained ‘a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration.’

He was referring to the Great Financial Crash of 2008, the pandemic, the explosion in energy prices after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the rise of Donald Trump and the 21st-century march of the autocrats (most notably China and Russia) – all of which, taken together, have undermined the old world order of international rules and global institutions.

‘Many countries are drawing the same conclusions,’ he went on ‘that they must develop greater strategic autonomy: in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains.

‘And this impulse is understandable. A country that can’t feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.’

Now, coming from a fully-paid up member of the liberal global elite – a WEF denizen and something of a Net Zero zealot to boot – this is dynamite stuff.

For Carney to acknowledge that the era of global integration is over is quite something.

But he does. Indeed he asserts that what he calls the ‘Middle Powers’, like Canada, the UK, the major European economies, who benefited from the old order, who projected power and protected their interests by working through global institutions – like the WTO, UN, COP, EU, Nato (all orchestrated by a largely benign America) – need now to realise the game is up. If you can’t feed, fuel and defend yourself in what Carney calls this new world of ‘rupture’, then you’re finished.

You need to develop strategic autonomy in all these areas to survive, sometimes in combination with other middle powers in mutual self-interest, but on your own if need be.

Carney isn’t just talking the talk. These are his priorities for Canada. He is doubling defence spending by 2030 and will increase it further after that. He’s doing so in a manner designed to rebuild Canada’s domestic industries.

He’s junked a lot of his Net Zero baggage to increase Canada’s energy security by removing constraints on oil and gas production. He’s planning to build a controversial oil pipeline to the West Coast to diversify energy exports to Asia and reduce dependency on the American market, seen as increasingly unreliable.

Yet billions are being poured into Ed Miliband’s barmy dash to Net Zero while military spending is starved of funds

He’s just returned from China with a bilateral trade deal of the sort that will replace the multilateral deals of the past.

This is a wake up call for the British Government, which should take stock. Carney is providing a template for how to survive in a scary new world in which the old rules no longer apply. It is not something he relishes. He recognises that a ‘world of fortresses’ will not prosper as much or as fast as the more seamless, globalised world of recent years. But we are where we are. Not where he’d like to be.

If only our own Government was as clear-sighted. Food. Fuel. Defence. These are Carney’s watchwords in seeking as much strategic autonomy as possible for Canada. They should guide British policy, too.

We need to be able to feed ourselves better from our own resources. To be able to count on cheap, secure sources of energy. And to have the military muscle to defend ourselves from multiple and growing threats.

Instead, in food, fuel and defence the Starmer Government is doing the exact opposite of what needs to be done.

Forty years ago we were almost 80 per cent self-sufficient in food. Today it’s barely 60 per cent. As is so often the case with what now ails Britain, the rot set in under previous Tory governments.

Even after Brexit, freeing us from the French imperatives of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, they concocted a system of subsidies designed not to increase food production but to implement various fashionable environmental wheezes.

The Starmer Government has continued in the same vein, while introducing penal tax policies which are driving farmers out of business. The idea of agricultural subsidies designed to incentivise farmers to produce more food isn’t even on its radar. It’s much more enthusiastic about covering acres and acres of fine farming land with solar panels.

That, of course, is part of a renewables energy policy which will for ever lumber British business with the most expensive energy costs in the world and British households with the second or third most expensive domestic energy in the world.

Renewable energy is intermittent, which makes it less than reliable. It is also less than secure, given so much of it depends on foreign supply chains, especially from China. The new world of strategic autonomy depends on cheap, secure energy. We have neither. Yet billions are being poured into Ed Miliband’s barmy dash to Net Zero while military spending is starved of funds.

Ministers have been reduced to lying about the scale of our rearmament to hide the fact it is infinitesimal. I have dwelt at length on the lack of defence spending on these pages before. Suffice to repeat that it remains a national scandal.

On food, fuel and defence the Starmer Government chalks up three massive failures. It’s not simply a case of not doing enough. It is moving in the wrong direction, taking us down the path to oblivion.

Carney’s Canada gets it. So does Germany, where chancellor Friedrich Merz has embarked on £500billion’s worth of military Keynsianism to boost not just defence but defence-related infrastructure and manufacturing. Even cash-strapped France gets it. President Macron, after all, was the first to devise the concept of strategic autonomy.

Britain is being left behind – and nothing will change under the current Government. Starmer has neither the vision nor aptitude to meet the challenge. His Labour Party is a prisoner to old ways of thinking and redundant priorities. If it’s now heading for a leadership contest you can be sure none of the above will form any part of the debate.

Our politics dwells on the frivolous, the insignificant, the irrelevant – when what’s at stake is nothing less than national survival. Until we recognise that we cannot be regarded as a serious country.