ArcaMax

PARIS — Trump shows up at the Davos World Economic Forum like a guy crashing his ex’s wedding, completely baffled about why he’s so disliked.

“I’m helping NATO, and until the last few days when I told them about Iceland, they loved me. They called me ‘daddy’ last time… ‘He’s our daddy,'” Trump said in his public address to the Western-led business and political establishment.

“But now what I’m asking for is a piece of ice, cold and poorly located that can play a vital role in world peace and world protection. It’s a very small ask.”

All Daddy wants is some damn ice for his drink. Not even good ice. Cold ice. “Poorly located” ice. Which makes it sound like someone dropped it behind the bar and kicked it under Greenland. Who wants that ice? Nobody!

Lucky for you, Daddy will take it off your hands. And what’s a little ice between friends, considering everything Daddy’s done for NATO, like, say, extorting them into buying more American weapons at the expense of their own industries. Ungrateful!

“The problem with NATO is that we’ll be there for them 100 percent, but I’m not sure that they’ll be there for us,” Trump said, apparently having slept through the entire Global War on Terror, where Washington’s allies rode shotgun into two decades of disaster and paid with blood and treasure.

Anyway, Daddy needs that ice now. “Iceland” — he said several times — meaning Greenland. For “world protection.” Mostly it’s about Canada though, he suggests, which “lives because of the U.S.” And it’d be a real shame if something happened to it … Mark! Do you think that perhaps there's a non-zero chance that Trump got wind of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s standing ovation for his own speech a day earlier?

Europe, Canada, and every other Washington ally do owe Trump a debt of gratitude, but only because he’s finally forced them to stop pretending that the Washington-led world order is fair.

Turns out that it’s selective, coercive and mostly benefits Washington. Everyone knew this. They just didn’t say it out loud until Trump started swinging wildly — at them. As Carney said on Tuesday, the mask is off, and now everyone’s edging away from the guy holding the bat.

“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim,” Carney told a rapt Davos audience.

“We participated in the rituals and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality,” he said.

Know who didn’t avoid doing that? Freedom-loving, fairness-minded populists who have spent the era of globalization watching their leaders prostrate themselves to Washington’s interests while their own countries suffered — and wondering if their leaders were corrupt or just unimaginably stupid. Turns out it was corruption, Carney suggests, as they all played along with the charade.

Now Carney’s sounding like someone whose software just updated to Populism 2.0: “You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”

Not that there aren’t glitches to work out with that new software. Carney had barely made it back to Canada before denouncing “rising populism and ethnic nationalism.” You mean the same populism that you’ve just admitted was right about the perils of globalism?

“Canada can show how diversity can be a strength, not a weakness,” Carney said at his party’s retreat.

Diversity of trade, perhaps — which is what critics have been saying all along. Unlike the globalist kind of diversity that now has European countries scrambling to figure out which third countries they can sweep migrants under, in extraordinary immigration control measures that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.

Carney is trying to reframe globalism as sensible cooperation. The kind that leads to national sovereignty and independence that skeptics have long advocated through diversified trade and partnerships while the globalists were busy coming up with buzzwords like “friendshoring” for limiting their relationships to Washington’s pre-approved buddy nations. Carney is trying to redefine globalism while tightening Canada’s immigration tap like a populist: capping work permits, limiting student visas and making foreign spouses wait.

Carney — former central banker of both Britain and Canada — seems to be infusing globalism with populist currents to preserve the globalist brand. They clearly think that populism is a dirty word. Which is ridiculous, since it was a descriptor for the civil rights movement last century, when ordinary people mobilized to challenge entrenched powers. For instance, feminist icon Gloria Steinem wrote of her hope for a “national populist women’s movement.”

So why not give credit to populism where it’s due and embrace it as pro-humanity and people-first instead of badmouthing it while stealing its best features? If Carney wants to do that, may I suggest "Glo-Pop" — or globalist populism — for globalist newcomers to populism like Carney who aren't quite ready to switch to the full-fat version.

This global geopolitical earthquake is entirely thanks to Trump, who paraded the Washington-led Western establishment’s agenda naked for all to see, making even its most ardent supporters queasy because he couldn’t be bothered dressing it up like his predecessors did in an ill-fitting corset of cordiality. Without him, arguably none of this would have happened so soon.

And because Trump routinely sounds like the Godfather, using the coercive powers of the state to shake down foreign leaders — most recently Europe over the “Iceland” called Greenland — he’s smashed the globalist façade to pieces, leaving the elites no choice but to admit what ordinary citizens and critics have been warning about for years: that the system they’ve long propped up was never designed to serve the interests of the average person.