Carney’s vision at Davos ignores the UN and smaller nations

Carney is correct: we should act together to resist the lawless, power-mad Trump.

However, in his enthusiasm for a middle-power alliance, Carney devoted little attention to the one forum that the world constructed — amid the ruins of the Second World War — specifically to deal with a ruthless megalomaniac with designs on other countries.

That is, of course, the United Nations, established when the world’s nations came together, in the aftermath of Hitler, to create a body to restrain aggressors and replace the ravages of war with peace and human development.

For all its flaws, the UN remains the embodiment — and the closest humans have come — to achieving those worthy aspirations.

It is the UN, and its International Court of Justice, that establish the rules-based international order to protect the sovereignty of all nations.

But the UN is only as strong as its members make it.

And in recent years, it’s been weakened by the Trump administration, which has deprived it of funding, sought to undermine its authority and now effectively seeks to replace it with the preposterous Trump-designed “Board of Peace,” to be controlled and headed by Trump himself.

So, it’s disappointing that Carney’s Davos speech barely mentioned the UN, and focused instead on an alliance of middle powers, leaving many of the world’s nations “on the menu.”

We saw this western-focused approach from Carney last month when he raised no objections to Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, but was outspoken against Trump’s threats against Greenland, which is part of the kingdom of Denmark.

Surely, we want a rules-based international order that seeks to protect the rights and security of all the world’s nations — as the UN does — not just the western countries that would make up a coalition of middle powers.

Interestingly, Canada played a significant role at the UN in its early years, ensuring that middle and smaller powers had some real influence. Canada was also pivotal in developing UN peacekeeping.

Canada remains supportive of the UN, but we’ve greatly reduced our UN peacekeeping role and been a less robust UN champion.

In 2017, for instance, the Trudeau government refused to join when two-thirds of UN member nations ratified an ambitious treaty aimed at ultimately ridding the world of nuclear weapons.

And Carney — even as he rebuked Trump in Davos for rupturing international law — had nothing to say about an egregious breach of international law that same day, as Israeli forces stormed and then burned down the Jerusalem offices of the UN aid agency UNRWA, on which millions of Palestinian depend for survival.

For that matter, Carney has been largely silent in recent months as Israel has blocked UN aid deliveries and continued to kill Palestinians — more than 500 Palestinians have been killed since the Gaza “ceasefire” — in what genocide scholars have called a “genocide.”

Carney is right that we can no longer rely on the U.S. to enforce international law. In fact, we never could. Washington was always primarily interested in advancing its own interests.

Now that we can abandon any pretence that the U.S. upholds international law, we should put our efforts into strengthening the world body that actually does uphold international law — and does so on behalf of the world community, not just the privileged western part of it.

This article was originally published in the Toronto Star.