Alicia Wanless

Senior Fellow for Technology and International Affairs and Director of the Information Environment Project, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Carney is a responsible adult at a time when many politicians have reverted to brutish playground behavior. Is that a third way? Or the way it was supposed to be?

Carney is a realist who understands that the United States is a behemoth to which Canada is deeply interconnected, but that this relationship leaves the country vulnerable. He’s expressed a desire for a trade agreement with the United States, but not at all costs, while working to diversify Canada’s trade and investment relationships.

Canada provides roughly 90 percent of U.S. potash imports, on which American agriculture depends; nearly two-thirds of its crude oil imports; and almost all its natural-gas imports. Carney has levers he doesn’t even threaten to use, likely because they are nuclear. Instead, he calmly tells American officials to stop “throwing shade” in their digs, if not veiled threats, about the Canadian military.

Is it working? There is still no trade deal.

Whether Carney’s approach is better will be determined in the long run. That might be measured not in reaching a trade deal but in keeping the country together or achieving long-term growth and diversification across trade, defense, and security.

Philipp Lausberg

Senior Policy Analyst, European Policy Centre

Canada is showing Europe an important third way—but not one the EU can simply copy.

Carney is right that countries need not choose between submission to great-power pressure and economic rupture. His response to Trump combines deterrence with an effort to reduce Canada’s dependence on the United States—through stronger cooperation with other middle powers and a selective economic rapprochement with China.

Europe should strengthen its own resilience and follow Carney’s push for stronger cooperation with like-minded partners, but it cannot use China in the same way. China is a direct competitor across much of Europe’s industrial base. Trading dependence on Washington for greater dependence on Beijing would be a poor foundation for European strategic autonomy.

Nor should Europe think of itself merely as another middle power. With a market of 450 million people, vast industrial, technological, and financial resources, and considerable regulatory and trade power, the EU has the potential to become a third major economic pole alongside the United States and China.

That also gives Europe a broader responsibility. Middle-power coalitions will remain fragile unless anchored in shared rules and common values. Europe should follow Carney’s example but aspire to become the leader of that wider coalition.

Rem Korteweg

Geopolitics of Trade Program Lead, Clingendael

Somewhat surprisingly, Carney has become the leader of the liberal West. He has gained tremendous credit for standing up to the Trump administration, whereas European leaders are divided, domestically embattled, and hesitant. And doing so has boosted his domestic popularity: 76 percent of Canadians supported his August 2026 decision to walk out of trade talks with the United States.

That is a figure European leaders can only dream of. As elections approach across Europe, will Carney inspire copycat behavior across the EU? One thing is clear: The days of a singular West under U.S. leadership are over.

Elvire Fabre

Director of the Trade and Economic Security Program, Jacques Delors Institute

Carney is right because the illusion that bilateral negotiations could limit the damage has allowed Trump to keep sabotaging the rules-based order. Carney is also right because he is succeeding in giving Canadian citizens the confidence that they can defend their sovereignty—even at the cost of a trade war with a country that absorbs over 70 percent of Canadian goods exports.

But it’s the economy of scale, stupid! The failure of the rest of the world to mount a coordinated response to Trump’s economic coercion and imperialism since early 2025 is a collective failure. Resilience depends on diversification, and diversification depends on coordination with partners. A third way was already available last year: structured coordination between the EU and countries in the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership. It must be actively accelerated.

Thorsten Benner

Co-Founder and Director, Global Public Policy Institute

U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy last month made fun of Canada, “a country that doesn’t have a military,” saying it was “foolish” to think “they’re gonna go to war with Donald Trump and actually win that war.” Not only is this a ridiculous insult of the United States’ northern neighbor, which fought shoulder to shoulder with it in most recent wars, but Duffy might also be proved wrong. If you define winning as “not folding when faced with a predatory bully,” then Carney’s Canada might well show that it is possible to win against Trump, confirming what China, Brazil, and Iran have already demonstrated. The ingredients for success include majority political support for countering Trump, an ability to absorb the costs of his actions, and a willingness to apply leverage and impose one’s own costs on Trump.

The EU, for the most part, lacks the political unity among its members to follow a similar path, given its vulnerability to the Kremlin—a threat Canada does not face in the same way—and its dependence on U.S. military support and technology. That is why the EU has failed to join forces with Carney. But this calculus might shift if Trump gets more aggressive and unreliable while becoming politically weaker as a lame duck after November’s midterm elections.

Minna Ålander

Analyst, Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs

When Carney decides it’s not the economy, stupid, that means something—he was the governor of two central banks before becoming Canadian prime minister, after all. He has decided to fight back in the trade war against the United States, “dollar for dollar.”

The EU, meanwhile, never fired the trade bazooka. The reasons for not doing so were complex, not least with regard to the urgency of Europe taking over the brunt of supporting Ukraine in the first half of 2025. But deals in Trump’s world are fickle, and it may well be that a currently dormant trade conflict can heat up again, so opportunities to retaliate are not necessarily over.

In July 2026, Carney and Finland’s President Alexander Stubb wrote in the Economist “Middle powers of the world, unite!” and called for a new way of working through ad hoc coalitions. Apart from the fact that Finland isn’t exactly a middle power, such ad hoc coalitions are short term and unstable. The big challenge for Carney will be how to reduce and navigate that instability if his third way is to become a feasible long-term alternative.

Richard Higgott

Distinguished Professor of Diplomacy, Brussels School of Governance

Yes, Carney is different: knowledgeable, articulate, moderate, and sensitive to the dramatic decline in an overhyped liberal, rules-based international order. And, despite being a former banker, he has captured in his language of “rupture” and “middle powers” the ascendancy of the narrative of geopolitics over that of economic globalization that dominated the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

But Carney is perhaps less original than many assume. The world was already moving toward a second middle-power moment before his Davos speech. The first such moment came at the end of the Cold War. Led by the Nordics, Australia, and Canada, middle powers then were white, Western, rich, democratic, and supportive of the U.S.-led unipolar order.

Middle powers now are increasingly Southern and much more instrumental. It remains to be seen whether Carney can sustain this discourse rather than that of the Southern middle powers. But would Carney’s international moment exist without Trump’s assistance? Unlikely. It is Trump’s ability to alienate the rest of the world that is making Carney a major international figure. It is Trump’s rebarbative awfulness that allows the rest of us to eulogize Carney’s empathy, reasonableness, and common sense.

Catherine Fieschi

Visiting Scholar, Carnegie Europe

Yes—but only if we understand the “third way” correctly. Carney is not proposing equidistance between Washington and Beijing, nor pretending Canada can escape its dependence on the United States. His strength is the opposite: He has the measure of Canada. His questions are which dependencies it can live with, which it must reduce, and where accommodation costs more than resistance.

Canada is a G7 country with enormous resources but a middle power whose economy is integrated with the United States. Carney’s argument—at Davos and in the trade confrontation with Trump—is that dependence should not be confused with submission. Middle powers gain leverage by knowing their limits, diversifying their relationships, and acting together.

That is where the contrast with the EU matters. Europe is much larger economically than Canada yet more cautious in dealing with Trump. The problem may be that Europe sees itself as a potential third pole alongside the United States and China. That encourages the belief that Europe’s size will give it leverage—and that preserving the relationship and buying time are forms of power.

Canada has fewer such illusions: It knows just how dependent it is on the United States. Paradoxically, that may clarify its choices.

Linas Kojala

Chief Executive Officer, Geopolitics and Security Studies Center

Carney deserves credit. He is right that the world is not going back to what it was, and that countries such as Canada will have to become less dependent on any single partner. Canada also matters a great deal to Europe, including through its leadership of NATO forces in Latvia and support for Ukraine.

At the same time, a third way is more convincing when it is demonstrated in actual policy. That means higher defense spending (on which Canada has made real progress), the elimination of dependence on Russian energy, firm sanctions, and greater economic resilience. There is still a lot of work to do in all of these areas, both in Canada and in Europe.

There are also clear limits. Canada is deeply tied to the U.S. economy, while Europe still relies heavily on the United States for its security. That will not change quickly, especially in a more hostile geopolitical environment. Democracies will simply have to work more closely together, rather than separately, to deal with pressure on several fronts.

The real test is whether middle powers are prepared to do things that would have been politically impossible only a few years ago. That is what adapting to the new reality means.