The Munk Debates Podcast - Friday Focus: Trump's Davos TACO, Carney's vision for Canada, and an AI deepfake blurs the lines of reality

Episode Date: January 23, 2026

Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to full length editions of the Friday Focus podcast with Janice Stein. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up.   Rudyard and Janice begin the show with the remarkable-sized TACO Trump delivered this week, whipping the world into a frenzy over threats to take over Greenland. His tough talk turned into a whimper after a meeting with the NATO Secretary General and a framework of a deal that has not been accepted by European leaders. What happened behind closed doors that made Trump back down from these threats? How did the bond market play into this? Meanwhile Mark Carney's Davos speech was well received by the European elite, but what is his plan for Canada? How will he enact sweeping and fundamental change in this country that match the substance of his speech? In the second half of the show Rudyard and Janice discuss an AI-generated video impersonating former UN Ambassador John Bolton discussing Mark Carney's China visit. The convincing video - which has been viewed over 180,000 times - is a reminder of how easily AI can be used by interference and influence campaigns by foreign governments. What if 2026 is the year we can't tell what's real and what's not? Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Friday Focus podcast for the 23rd of January, 26. I'm Richard Griffiths Chair of the Monk Debates, joined by Janice Gross Stein, the founding director of the Monk School of Global Affairs. Even by our standards, Janice, on the crazy weeks that we have to cover on this show in international relations. This one kind of takes the cake, doesn't it? It sure does, Richard. I can't remember a week like this, honestly. NATO hanging by a thread, tensions unbelievably high, Davos hijacked, and then within four hours diffused. Let's begin by talking about the president, because he was the central dramatic character of all of this craziness.

And I would say, Janice, get your thoughts on this. He humiliated himself this week in a way that even for Donald Trump is surprising. He, as you said, whipped the world into a frenzy of anxiety over his supposed desire to acquire Greenland, including possibly not ruling out the use of force. That all died with a whimper in some kind of opaque conversation with the Secretary General of NATO, where Trump alleged that he was promised, I don't know what, little zones of real estate, little bubbles of sovereignty on the ice pack that is Greenland. This is being denied strenuously.

resisted rightly so by the Danish Prime Minister. And then not 24 hours later, he convenes this grotesque meeting of his so-called peace board, and it features not a single European. Mark Carney is not there. No leader of any significance of any part of the so-called West attends. And instead, it's a grab bag of malcontents and misfits. from, you know, Belarus to Burkina Faso. What did the president do to himself?

And is this kind of, in a sense, a new low for the Trump administration? There's no doubt Richard that he gave an absolutely dreadful speech. Let's be honest. I watched that speech, and I watched the faces of Americans in that audience. You know, they didn't know what to do with them. frankly when the camera passed over some familiar Americans who were listening.

They literally had their hands covering their faces at times because they didn't know what to do. It was rambling. It was a rant. He was tired. We went through the great never before has this been seen in the world and probably, Nobody else has ever done this, we'll never do it again. And, you know, in contrast to the Carney speech the week before, the day before, rather, it was really something. The Peace Board is a little bit of a different story, frankly, not because the terms of reference are not vintage Donald Trump.

I run the world, right? I'm chairman for life of this board. I get to decide who's on it. I charge you a billion dollars to join. And my word goes. Janus, it's Mar-a-Lago for the masses. Right. So let's call it Mar-Lago model for international relations.

But Erdogan is going to join the President Turkey. And just for a moment, let me say something. that was obvious to me, Europe is the only con and missing. You know, we have persons from South America, we have persons from Africa, we have presidents and shahls from the Middle East, and some from Asia, who's missing? Europe.

It was almost, it struck me right here. It was a real moment in international history, drives home how the democracies are an increasingly smaller group confined, frankly, to Europe, North America, and a few big ones, India, Japan, South Korea, and a few in South America. And it's a shrinking group, not a growing group, the growing group, happy to join the board. tells you something about the world. Mark Carney was not at that meeting, snubbing the president at Davos.

To be fair. Let's hope it stays that way. He was on the plane. A billion dollars to sit with Vladimir Putin and other autocrats like the ruler of Turkey. And I don't know, we can add those wonderful freedom-loving folks in Qatar who are part of the Peace Board too. Well, yeah, you know, I understand why no Western leader, including our department, who diplomatically decided to be on a plane that day on his way of Quebec City for a retreat,

so he had to leave. But there's a bigger picture here. It's inconceivable 25 years ago that you would have had no European on that board. board is inconceivable. But Janice, the organization is preposterous. The reason why no serious leader is sitting on that board who's in any kind of democratic society where they have checks and accountability on their power is that politically it's suicide. Yes, that's absolutely right.

But the autocrats can go fill their boots with Donald Trump and pay their billion dollars and have their pretend autocratic UN. and the rest of us, I think we learn this week. We can go about our business. We can... Just as long as we understand that we're shrinking minority. Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I'll do that. Let's talk about the star of Davos, though.

Mark Carney, his speech on resurgent middle powers, that it was kind of echoes of Louis Saint Laurent and Michael B. Pearson. Better. Canada back as the indispensable power, at least in the context of Davos, and saying some tough things that needed to be said. I think it was actually better because it, there's two parts to the speech, right? The first part was a Canadian prime minister getting up and saying the liberal international order is gold. is debt. He had to say that. It was imperative, and I think the most important reason he had to say

that is not only because it's true, but because that was a hugely important market signal at home to his own government and to the people who make policy, and he followed it up with another market signal, which is nostalgia is not a strategy. We're not going to get, we're not going to mourn. We're going to look forward. You and I both know the pace of change in Ottawa is deeply concerning. I think it's incredibly important for this country and really foundational. It was a foundational speech as far as I was concerned for Canada that he draw a line in the sand and say, it's time to change, it is time to go forward in a different way than we've gone in the past. I agree with all that.

And look, I hope that that speech now culminates after nine months of extensive international travel and meeting by this prime minister on an agenda to return to Canada, return to the domestic agenda to give a similar speech, I don't know, at the Monk School of Global Affairs, setting out what is the equivalent domestic agenda that we are going to put against his rupture thesis? He's a good speaker, but he has not really let us in on his plan for Canada, how he is going to enact sweeping and fundamental change in this country to bring about a scale of response internally, and the addition of new capabilities that match the sobriety of that Davos address. But let me just pivot for a moment

because I want to get your thoughts on maybe what really happened to Davos. I've got a theory for you. Scott Besant, the U.S. Treasury Secretary, was over there a day or so early, and he was complaining pretty vociferously to European leaders, you know, wait till Trump gets here, everything will be figured out. And supposedly what was annoying him was two very prominent pension funds, one in Holland,

I believe in another one in Sweden, were either actively divesting themselves of U.S. treasuries or were threatening to do so. I have a theory. It's a bit like what happened with the president's ridiculous Rose Garden tablets of Moses speech on tariffs that caused a big crash in stock markets last April. I think Bessent was pulled aside. I think he was pulled aside by some serious players in Europe and said, if you go ahead with this, if you don't get your guy to climb down now, like in the next 24 hours, we're simply going to go on a buyer's strike. We're going to stop purchasing U.S. Treasuries.

We saw the bond market react in a bad way earlier in the week in the United States with boring costs on longer duration debt, increasing just at the moment that the president is involved in, I won't go into the details, but he's involved in using the U.S. Treasury to buy mortgages to try to lower the boring costs for new U.S. homeowners on their mortgages. He thinks this is a key part, obviously, of his scheme to kind of survive the midterm elections. What do you think about that, Janice? Is this event in Davos somehow exposing a fundamental weakness of the United States that despite Trump's bravado, the chest thumping, the threatening, the grimaces, all of it.

Beneath that is a highly financialized, highly indebted economy running massive deficits at six odd percent of GDP. and when Europe or other big players like China flash a little bit of steel, these guys fold like a cheap suit. Well, I think you're absolutely right. Let me make two comments because the China play and the Europe play were so different. Let's talk about that one you just talked. about the bond market was already flashing warning signals, and I think it's entirely probable

that given the Davos attracts the business elite of the world, I would be very surprised if the Treasury Secretary were not told, hey look, this is just a step too far. We can overlook Venezuela, and we can overlook this, but we cannot overlook an action. in Europe, which would disrupt all of NATO. You pull your guy back, or we simply won't buy your bonds, as you just said, now what does that matter? The United States is a debtor country. You and I have talked repeatedly that some of what Donald Trump does is because he needs

revenue. If you can't finance your debt at rates that don't shoot through the roof, you don't Trump is in big trouble before the midterms. There's no question. So who got this play going? That's the point here. I think Mark Carney did. I don't think, well, we won't know that.

We'll never know that. He's a central banker. There's no one who knows the world's financial plumbing better that he did. I almost wonder if Trump's strange kind of backhand at Cardi as Davos went on wasn't precisely that he knows that Carney knows that he was part of those conversations, part of a concerted strategy to make the Americans... You know, he got there quite late. There's something called cell phones.

There's something called cell phones and Zoom calls. Look, I don't know. I think there's a lot of potential here that we now see an opening. And it just, again, as important as Carney's speech is, I end the week less gloomy maybe than the prime minister. Is it a fundamental rupture? I don't know if the Americans are this much of a paper tiger, if they are this vulnerable to pressure, we have lots of levers here in Canada.

We're a major holder of U.S. treasuries just to start before you even get into countervailing tariffs and pain points that we can extract throughout the American economy if our back is against the wall. If he tries to go into our Arctic or transit our Northwest Passage or claim sovereign military bases in Canada, far north. I think we learn this week, Janice, the value of pushing back, the value of finally saying no to the bully and stopping, as you and I've discussed, I think I've expressed my frustration over the last nine months with European leaders and others at times the prime minister, this stroking of Trump going to his ridiculous FIFA, you know, peace trophy event, grinning and gripping and glad-handed, he doesn't deserve it and we don't need to do it anymore.

Well, again, we have to be careful here because why this worked this time, but it didn't, you know, there was no tackle on Venezuela, just for the record here. Because no one cared about Maduro. Well, that's right. Okay. So that's the point. There was no taco on Iran when the United States bombed the nuclear installation. If anything, there was probably quiet support in both cases for doing some of this. So when the tackle happens, it's only happened really twice, right? Although he's done it on tariffs, on and off, on and off, on. If you can remember back to the beginning of all, it seems like an eternity ago, but it was only nine months. But there was a real taco twice.

The first is when the Chinese started to slow or halt the export of critical minerals, which, let's face it, would have brought manufacturing in the United States to halt sooner or later and probably quite quickly. He got that picture very quickly, and he did an about-face-on tariffs. The second is over this issue, but you've got to get, it's not enough for Canada alone, no matter how many treasuries we hold, to be blunt, you have to get the market movers, and Canada is not a market mover here, Rudyard. The Europeans collectively had that power that was in that room at Davos, which is partly what people hate it, the market mover.

So the issue has to be of such importance that the big market movers, care about it. That's really... I would just say, I would just say we have weight. Well, we have friends in Europe. That's the point. Yeah, but we also have real weight vis-a-vis the United States in terms of economic pain points, NORAD, all kinds of moments of leverage that if we choose to use, we can knock 15, 20% off the S&P 500 if we want, and it only took two. That's my point, Janice, it took a 2% fall in the S&P 500 and a less than 2% correction in the US 30-year bond for this guy to melt like an ice cube under heat lamp. Okay?

Jess, this is a fascinating discussion, but I want to take a short break because I've got to come back on the other side and talk about an AI video that you and I saw this week, that we want to alert our membership to and just have a conversation briefly. as we round out this episode about a real crisis of AI that's happening that I think matters to all of us. And I think collectively we got to figure that out. So we're going to bring that to you right after this short break. Thank you for listening to the first half of the Friday Focus podcast. To access the full episode, consider becoming a monk donor.

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