Front Burner - Carney’s mission to turn Europe from the U.S.

Episode Date: July 13, 2026

It’s no secret that Prime Minister Mark Carney thinks Canada should reduce its dependence on the U.S. It’s a message he delivered on the world stage in Davos. But new reporting from the Wall Street Journal illustrates how Carney has been making this pitch to European leaders behind the scenes, and how he’s become a central figure in the attempts to reimagine the West’s alliances. Today on Front Burner, journalists Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw on their reporting, gleaned from conversations with heads of government, ministers, top aides, as well as detailed notes of private meetings and classified intelligence assessments. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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Hi, I'm Jamie Poisson. It's no secret that Prime Minister Mark Kearney thinks Canada should reduce its dependence on the U.S. It's a message that he delivered on the world stage in Davos. Argue the middle powers must act together because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu. But the Wall Street Journal has recently published these pretty remarkable deep dives into how Carney's being aggressively making this pitch to European leaders behind the scenes and how that now-famous speech wasn't his opening salvo, but actually the culmination of a month-long campaign.

Joe Parkinson and Drew Hinshaw are the two journalists behind these stories, which have got a lot of people talking, and they joined me today. Joe, Drew, thank you so much for being here. It's really great to have you. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you. As I was mentioning before we got up and running, a lot of people here are talking about this reporting,

so I've been kind of dying to have this conversation with you both. But why don't we start here after Kearney gave that now very famous speech in Davos at the height of all the Greenland stuff? You write that 30 European leaders met in Brussels in a room that they call the space egg

to decide what to do next. Essentially, the most important politicians in Europe were all there, French President Emmanuel Macron, Italian Prime Minister, Georgia Maloney, German Chancellor, Frederick Mertz, and just take me inside that meeting what happened in that room? Joe, maybe I'll start with you. Sure. Well, what we were trying to do with this reporting was to try and find out beneath the public rhetoric and the platitudes what was actually being said about all of the geopolitical turbulence that we've

been witnessing over the last 18 months behind closed doors where the Western leaders, the European leaders and the Canadian leadership were able to speak in a frank and true manner. And the meeting that you're describing, which was the European leaders, just a few hours after the Greenland crisis peaked in Davos, was probably the most important meeting that we were able to construct. This is a meeting where the heads of government across Europe file in without their cell phones, which are put in a signals blocking case. There are no aides for the prime ministers and presidents. There's no recording. And the way that this conversation was described to us was five hours, which amounted to something which people called therapy. And the therapy was talking about just what had happened, how the West had got to the point in Greenland where Danish troops with blood bags, with explosives to blow up runways, backed by French and other troops from seven allied nations, were in Greenland deployed for a particular. potential shooting war with the United States after the president had refused to rule out military action.

And in this meeting, just the most extraordinary things were said about the feeling that the alliance had crossed a threshold, the feeling that the allies could no longer rely on America in a way that they had done before, really, since the Second World War, all through the Cold War. And President Macron put it pretty bluntly, said, we have to draw a line here and there is no going back. And not everyone agreed on how to deal with it or whether or not you could go back, right? I understand Georgia Maloney, for example, was a holdout. Just tell me a little bit about that. At this point, even though the crisis was so acute, there wasn't a total consensus around the idea of trying to rebuild the plumbing of the alliance to be less reliant on the U.S. There were still a couple of holdouts who I think were just as shocked as they were. still perhaps giving a sober judgment of where the US was.

Georgia Maloney, who'd invested a lot of political capital into backing President Trump and becoming friends, if you remember it, with Elon Musk during the early parts of the Second Trump administration. Even Chancellor Met, who I think, you know, the German-American alliance really is, you know, the crucial axis in NATO, also didn't really want to believe, I think, what they were seeing and were struggling to recognize or struggling to come to that conclusion that things had changed fundamentally.

There were voices in the room that put it incredibly starkly. The Prime Minister of Belgium said that if the status quo continues, then the Europeans risk becoming America's miserable slave. But now so many red lines are being crossed that you have the choice

between your self-respect. Being a happy vessel is wanting, being a miserable slave is something else. If you back down now, you're going to lose your dignity. And that's probably the most precious thing you can have in a democracy. It's your dignity. So we should... And what I think your listeners will be very interested in is that Pedro Sanchez,

the Prime Minister of Spain, as well as others, said, there is actually a way forward here. There is actually someone who's been telling us the path forward that we should take. And that is Prime Minister Carney. And he was, of course, referencing the speech in Davos, which was the clearest sort of manifesto for the West outside the U.S. to band together and form some kind of new alliance and still to date really that we've heard. And Drew, let me bring you in here to talk about Carney specifically,

because we know from your reporting that even before that speech, Carney had been pushing leaders in Europe to reduce their alliance on the U.S. for months. the speech was kind of like a culmination. And just what kinds of intelligence was Cardi getting as he assumed office in early 2025 from both intelligence officials, but also from his predecessor, Justin Trudeau? Well, this all began with the 51st state comments that Trump made, even in the weeks before his second presidency began. And I think a lot of Americans took that as mere stick. It was just one more kind of Trump episode in this long run. show, but it lit a fuse of unintended consequences that continues to burn today. Of course,

it helped Mark Carney become, you know, win an election to be prime minister. He was, liberals were facing this 20-point polling deficit before that 51st state episode. But it also ironically brought someone to power who had spent the years after the 2008 financial crisis when he was the Bank of England governor, thinking about how the West and the global economy generally had become overly dependent on a single unpredictable node, which was the United States and its dollar. As central bank governor in England, he had kind of tried to push other countries to find a dollar alternative that they could use that would make the world less reliant on America. Nobody really listened to that. It was sort of a kixotic idea happening in the corner

of our screens. But then he becomes prime minister. And in this really kind of history turns on the strangest things way, he had the phone numbers and the contact details in these years-long friendships with people in power. He knew Emmanuel Macron, who used to be Rothschild banker. and is now France's president. He knew from his banking days. He also knew the chairman of Black Rock's German subsidiary. Frederick Merce, now German's chancellor. He knew Alexander Stubb, who was president of Finland.

Once upon a time, he was the European investment banks, one of the lead bankers there. And so immediately, as he becomes Prime Minister, Carney, is texting these people. He keeps his British phone number, by the way. And he's texting all these European leaders. He's talking about big ideas with Stubb in particular, but others. He's talking to Maloney. and he's making the case that our alliance is overly dependent on a single node, which is the United States.

And our dependencies, which have just developed over decades, can be used against us. And we need to build a dense web of connections with each other for things like, you know, all our payments are processed in America. One of the first things Carney does is he does a review to ask, you know, where are our payments process? Where is Canada's data stored? All these kind of 21st century questions that haven't really been asked. And then he's going to European countries. And he's saying we need to ban together to process our own payments.

We need our own satellite connections. We need our own quantum computing, our own AI platforms that don't depend on the United States. And he has some experiences. And his predecessor, Justin Trudeau, has some experiences that perhaps their European counterparts have yet to have. Right? Like I just want to point to this very specific, alarming example. in a private phone conversation with Justin Trudeau, Trump had threatened to scrap the 1908 agreement

that delineated our shared border. Quote, I tear that up and your whole country unravels. Trump told Trudeau in one call. Another anecdote from your piece that I just want to highlight. You report that just before Carney took over, Trudeau's government had actually turned to Trump's son-in-law, Kushner for advice on how to deal with Trump's claims that Canada was a source of fentanyl. And just briefly, like, how did that actually work out for us?

Right. So in the first administration, there were a series of people that Canada and other governments could go to when they wanted to reach Trump and kind of, you know, do something like patch up trade agreements. As the second term's beginning, I think the Trudeau government, like other governments in the world, would learn. They're learning that those people aren't here. They're not in the room. the new administration is not composed of people who are as likely to push back against the president as the first term was. And so they reach out to Jared Kushner, who is one of the few constants between the first Trump presidency and the second. And Kushner's advice, his advice is, Trump's a very visual person. Make a video. And so Canada gets two Black Hawk helicopters to swoosh on the border and they get like of this really intimidating sniffer dog, like, you know, to like do a, a,

to stage a border patrol to show the president that, yes, we take your concerns that fentanyl is flooding into America from Canada seriously. I'd just say briefly, fentanyl, there's more fentanyl coming from the United States into Canada than Canada of the United States. This is a somewhat unfounded claim. But what Canada is dealing with is how do you deal with Trump 2.0? He's emboldened. He's won the popular vote. He's a two-term president. And he's surrounded by people who see their role as implementing Trump's vision, not treating him like this anomalous president who needs to be like.

you know, babysat, like maybe the first administration had. And so Canada makes this video. And instead of appeasing him and making him say, oh, they're taking border control seriously, it seems to fuel his interest. And he starts to talk about like, well, why is the border where it is? Should it be moved north? You know, why did this border happen?

And Canadian officials who are having to deal with this, this is happening now right at the moment when Trudeau's government is passing over to Carney, they are reading clinical studies about impulsivity to try to understand like what makes Trump's brain tick. They are reading biographies of his business and media career. They have this theory that this is price discovery. So in the New York real estate market, you might like ask an outrageous price for your building just to see like, you know, how the market reacts. So maybe that's what Trump is doing here. Maybe he's just seeing how it reacts.

Unfortunately, as the year goes by, it becomes more and more apparent that Trump is in on imposing harsh tariffs on Canada and offering basically one way out, which is Canada, becomes part of the United States. Just to add to that. Please. We're now 18 months into this second Trump administration, and people have adjusted to the degree you can adjust to this very unusual administration and its rhythms and its metabolism and its very unusual rhetoric, to put it diplomatically.

But cast your mind back to those early months and just how. centralized political power was in Washington, just how disorientated global leaders were as Trump raced to try and enact policy across his first 100 days. One of the Canadian officials that we spoke to said they were trying to make the case to the Europeans that this was so fundamentally different. It was going to require fundamentally different thinking. And the way they put it is, you know, there have been a lot of grenades thrown, but the first grenade that was thrown went off in our face. We felt that grenade explode. And European leaders, I think, were so sort of disorientated and overwhelmed by how powerful Trump seemed to be at that point. And Trump's power was actually having

reverberations in their own countries, emboldening, you know, the right wing and the populists and all of those things. They were very, very nervous about speaking out. And the Canadians registered and noticed there wasn't as much international support for Canada after these threats from Washington that the Canadians would have liked to see. And I think that stung. And I think that made them obviously feel the case very keenly from their perspective. And it meant that they were something of a Cassandra for the first six months or a year warning and warning from the outside. And those warnings have now actually moved into the mainstream. Okay, so there are millions of podcasts. And maybe you're cool to stick with the ones you

already know you like. But if you're just a little bit of podcasts, you're just a little bit of podcasts. But if you're just a little paranoid about missing out on the best new stuff, we can help. Every other Thursday, the Sounds Good newsletter will bring you one must-hear show from CBC podcasts. And because we're true audio nerds, we'll also tell you about shows that we love that we didn't make. Go to cbc.ca.ca.coms-good to subscribe. There's another extraordinary example in your piece, or your report that the Trudeau government had spoken to their British counterpart. about the potential for an alternative to the five-eyes intelligence sharing alliance and they were shut down by MI6. I couldn't believe that when I read that, that those conversations were even

going on. They wanted to broach that conversation. Let's start having a conversation here. There's clearly a big change here. The UK, Canada, and of course, New Zealand and Australia, they get a lot of their intelligence through five eyes. Let's start having a conversation about what we do if the U.S. becomes actively hostile to this alliance. or its members. And the UK, I think, was committed to a strategy of appease Trump, give Washington wins, do not rock the boat. This special relationship that the UK has with Washington is so important for its economy and its security. We're not going to do anything that might jeopardize that. We're not even going to broach questions that might call into question this relationship.

Even when King Charles was looking at visiting Canada as a gesture of support, start with, Kier Stomber, the prime minister of the UK, was quite nervous. Is this going to provoke the president? Is this something that we should really do? So I think in a way, the UK kind of represented a school of thought in Europe at that time, which was like, let's just plow forward, cover your eyes, don't make a point of this. Let's not talk about Greenland. Let's not talk about the Canada thing.

Let's just give the president wins and hope that he is committed to NATO and isn't hostile towards Europe and he goes on to other policy priorities. This was a strategy that was not just epitomized by the UK. Even Denmark that ultimately, of course, would end up having to deal with the most turbulence from Trump because of its sovereignty over Greenland. Even Denmark had a strategy when Trump was talking about Greenland in the lead up to what became the crisis, which was given a name by the European leaders, which was the grin and bear it strategy.

Just nod, just hope that this is a Trump phenomenon. Trump does Trump. And we're going to be able to, you know, style it out somehow in the way that we did in the first administration. But the diametrically opposed positions of Canada and the UK is one of, I think, the unknown threads of this drama that we were able to pull out with our reporting. Not many people really, I think,

have been talking about just how much of a clash there was behind the scenes between the Canadian government and the UK over how to deal with the U.S. And certainly the Secretary General of NATO, Mark Ruta, would fit in that appeasement bucket as well, right? He disagreed with Mark Carney. You write that he said that, like, those who have visions of a new world order without America at the center were basically touting like a pipe dream. You know, over time, though, Joe, can you tell me.

how it came to be that many of these leaders change their minds? Like, just tell me more about that. Well, Ruta certainly has been consistent and he has one job, which is to keep the U.S. in NATO, and he also doesn't have an electorate to answer to. So it is perhaps easier for him in public to look more supplicant, shall we say, to the U.S. and peddle this strategy. And certainly, Certainly, what our reporting revealed was that Ruta seemed to epitomize one camp, which was that we need to flatter Trump because I've looked under the bonnet here in NATO and the alliance. And frankly, if you think that we're going to be able to create an alliance of middle powers and wean ourselves off this fundamental reliance on the US, you are deluding yourself. versus Kani, who, from the get-go, I think, because of his thinking about the global economy's dependence on the US dollar and a small amount of American financial assets already had in his mind what might be a template to go forward. Now, I think Ruta certainly carried the majority of the Western leaders with him all the way through the early bumpy ride with the 51st state comments.

and then through the early, if you can remember back that, far so much has happened, but Trump's strategic strikes on the Iranian nuclear facilities before the war. It's only when we get to the tail end of 2025. Trump, first of all, of course, orders what was ultimately an incredibly successful exfiltration of Nicholas Maduro from Venezuela. And within days is talking to friends and associates at Mara Lago, including Katie Miller, the wife of his deputy chief of staff, Stephen Miller, where he's, it was in this kind of ruminative mood saying,

you know, I wish I had more time. I wish I could do Greenland. And the sources that we spoke to said at that point, he was very, very high off the success of the Venezuela operation. As the Greenland crisis gathers steam and as the Americans refused to take military action off the table, that is the threshold moment that changes minds in Europe. And I think the connection.

Canadians are very happy that the Europeans are now on board. And, you know, Prime Minister Carney, who's been talking to friends and allies throughout his premiership, is now publishing op-eds, you know, detailing this vision with some of them. But I think it's also, you know, one person that we spoke to did say it still remembered that when the 51st state comments were made, there wasn't really a lot of support for Canada. And actually only after Trump made his desires known for Greenland, did people come on board. So I think there's both a desire from Carney to build this middle power alliance

that he's been sketching out, but also this feeling that Canada, at a point, felt like it was somewhat isolated and alone. I would be very curious to hear what kind of reactions you've gotten to this piece since it came out. because I wonder, have you spoken to anybody who's like apprehensive about this leadership role that Carney is taking? Because really Canada is more reliant on the U.S. than any of these European countries, right? Absolutely. This is one of the paradoxes of this is Canada is leading this charge to create technology, weapon systems, space systems that aren't under America's control.

And yet Canada, which is advocating this path, is more reliant on the U.S. than almost. any country on earth, three-fourths of Canadian exports go to the United States, not to mention the how deeply interwoven, the intelligence sharing, the defense, all of it is so thread together. So I think from Canada's perspective, this is a very interesting balancing act because it needs to encourage European allies to help it build up capabilities that are outside American suzarinity, while at the same time not doing anything to provoke the president, who obviously has a certain kind of governing style that creates feuds with leaders and he likes to get revenge and things like that. So I myself am wondering how the Canadian government feels about our reporting because on the one hand,

it does show that Mark Carney has in a way won an argument among European leaders. At the same time, it's a spotlight on something that I think everybody would love to do this. Let me put it like, use a metaphor here. one official, one British official who described what NATO is doing right now compared it to a duck that is trying to look cool and calm on the surface but is furiously paddling under the water. And that's kind of what Canada has been doing, is trying to build up this alliance of middle powers

without doing anything to provoke the US. To use another metaphor, which has been used by other leaders about NATO, we're witnessing something like a very strained marriage. Okay. And for sure, nobody's filing divorce papers. And you saw the NATO summit and all of the positive rhetoric and all of the bonhomie that was there. And both sides, frankly, can't really afford a divorce right now. America and Trump talks about NATO being a terrible deal for the US.

But the US couldn't have even prosecuted its operations in Iran without European basing rights. And without the fundamental kind of plumbing of that infrastructure, the US still relies on too. Untangling all of these ties is going to be a massive undertaking. and we're only at the beginning of this kind of new act and new age. I think what we're witnessing is a marriage that is incredibly strained. And Canada really is, or the West, outside the U.S., is the spouse that's already kind of quietly, like, putting a new car in its name, quietly putting some assets in its name, but at the same time, not yet leaving the relationship because neither side can afford to.

Yeah. You know, I just want to highlight more anecdote from your piece, where one European leader was expressing frustration in having to deal with some of the characters in Trump administration and Carney replied, I have to deal with these guys every day. I mean, I did read some of this and things like, yikes. Like, there's also another anecdote in your piece where you talk about how Trump was quite displeased with Carney's speech that he watched it on Air Force One

and saw Canada as being ungrateful. You know, we are kind of currently trying to negotiate our key. agreement with them right now. You do go through quite a few concrete examples in your piece of how Europe and Canada are already distancing themselves from the United States around technology, around civil servants, for example, replacing Microsoft teams and Zoom. France is just the latest of a growing list of European governments that are moving away from U.S.-based tech platforms. By 2027, all French government employees will replace Microsoft Teams and Zoom with software that's made in France.

The move is fueling calls for the Canadian government to reduce its reliance on U.S. Big Tech Giants. Germany, France, Luxembourg, the Netherlands are rolling out their own homegrown texting services, the EU speeding up its schedule to launch several hundred European satellites for governments to communicate securely. So today we propose to Istanbul an EU-level selection procedure for the assignment of Spectrum. and this will create one single secure satellite system for governmental and commercial use. And this regulatory consistent will also allow operators to develop and provide services across borders. So the spectrum...

What do you think the ultimate impact of this distancing could be, even though we are still in this very strange relationship? The ultimate impact is very difficult to determine, because no one's run an experiment like this before. The Western Alliance and NATO as its defensive component is unprecedented in its power scope and its integration. No one's ever tried to disintegrate, if that's the correct word, an organisation like this.

And that's why I think most likely we're going to have peaks and flurries of activity and crossed rhetoric. But what will be happening will mostly stay away from the public eye because this is about the plumbing and the institutions and redirecting some of the pipework. And what the Europeans have managed to develop is that you have, I think, Kani, along with the Finnish president, Stubb,

along with the French president, Macron, and a couple of others, are publicly creating an argument and fleshing out what they think would be the correct structures for a new alliance of middle powers that is not so dependent on the US. while Mark Ruta is making sure that he keeps America in NATO and keeps Trump happy.

And so the two polls, if you like, that seemed like they were arguing with one another, have a degree of symmetry for making sure that this realignment can happen in a smooth way. That's what we all have to hope for. I just say that I think this whole process is going to most likely just leave every NATO country a little bit poorer, a little bit weaker. European governments are going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars replicating systems that traditionally they got from the U.S. And instead of building things that the U.S. doesn't have, like icebreakers, they're going to be building things that the U.S. already has just because they don't have the trust to think

if we're in trouble would the U.S. be there for us. Ultimately, I think this is a net negative for everyone. But it is where it is. This mistrust within the NATO alliances is very real. We spoke to prime ministers, their top of things. officials, cabinet ministers, and the emotions really come across. And it is a bit like a marriage. You know, divorces tend to be expensive. And this isn't quite a divorce, but it is definitely this whole process is leaving everybody worse off. Drew, Joe, this was fantastic. Thank you so much

for your time. Thank you. Sure. Thank you too, Jamie. Thanks very much for having us. All right. That is all for today. I'm Jamie Poisson. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you tomorrow. For more CBC podcasts, go to cBC.ca slash podcasts.