Canada's Carney: I Meant What I Said About the US

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney says he's not retreating from his much-talked-about speech in Davos, no matter what the US Treasury secretary thinks. "To be absolutely clear—and I said this to the president—I meant what I said in Davos," Carney told reporters Tuesday, reports Politico. "Canada was the first country to understand the change in US trade policy that he had initiated, and we're responding to that." In last week's speech, Carney urged the world's "middle powers" to push back against American "hegemony," a message that spread widely online and drew a sharp reaction from Washington.

In an appearance on Fox News Monday, Treasury chief Scott Bessent said Trump had spoken with Carney, who "was very aggressively walking back some of the unfortunate remarks he made at Davos." Carney disputed that in his comments to reporters Tuesday. Among other things, he said he and Trump discussed Canada's new trade deal with China, which drew the threat of a 100% tariff from Trump. Carney has emphasized it's not a comprehensive trade pact. "I explained to him what we're doing—12 new deals, four continents, in six months," Carney said, per the AP. "He was impressed."

As both sides continue to differ on the semantics—Bessent accused Carney of pushing "his own globalist agenda" to the detriment of Canada—the prime minister's speech is still being dissected. A New York Times headline above the transcript for the latest Ezra Klein podcast labels it "the most important foreign policy speech in years." The issue Carney raised revolves around a concept known as "weaponized independence," writes Klein, and it's one his podcast guest, Henry Farrell of John Hopkins, helped popularize. Klein's explanation:

• "The basic concept is that over time, in this globalized, woven-together world, there are a lot of ways in which being on American technologies and in American financial markets gave the United States leverage. This system was fine for our allies and for the world, as long as we didn't use that leverage too much. But now we've begun to make that a way we can harm them, a way we can extort them, a way we can control them, and that has really changed the nature of the bargain."