Good morning. This year’s World Economic Forum may be remembered as a defining moment in which the global order’s reliance on American backing became impossible to ignore. Today, we look at what comes next.

Trade: Canada’s agriculture minister sees “lots of opportunities” for Chinese investment under new trade agreements.

Telecom: Lenders to Ottawa-based Telesat are accusing the satellite operator of illegally moving the value of its “crown-jewel asset” – its low-Earth-orbit satellite business – out of their reach ahead of looming debt-repayment deadlines.

Manufacturing: How the arrival of Chinese EVs in Canada might lead to cheaper cars.

The existential threat: U.S. President Donald Trump says he is backing down on his threat to impose tariffs on European countries over his mission to annex Greenland. But global leaders are leaving the summit in Davos confronting the rupture of an international order that has been in place for decades.

After meeting with NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte in Davos yesterday, Trump said a “framework of a future deal” on the island has been reached – but did not reveal details of the agreement.

That might provide a measure of relief to European Union heads of state, who have called an emergency meeting today in Brussels to fashion a response to Trump’s threats. But even after Trump said in his Davos speech that he would not deploy the military to achieve his goals, and even after he later backed down on tariffs aimed at European countries that sent military personnel to Greenland, those leaders are still facing an existential crisis.

The fact that the threats were made at all, by the world’s largest economy and most important supporter of a decades-long system of free trade and Western defence, underscores how urgently they must act. If the world can’t predict when or how the U.S. might flex its economic and military muscle, the world has changed.

Carney put his elbows up: In what must be the first viral speech to reference Thucydides and Czech dissident Václav Havel in the first minute, Prime Minister Carney said the world is “in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” toward a global system of economic coercion by major powers.

“Middle powers must act together because, if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” he said in his remarks, which captured a common sentiment among leaders at the summit. Countries like Canada must not accept “subordination” and instead push back against economic intimidation.

Carney didn’t mention Trump by name, but the subtext wasn’t lost on the U.S. President. In his speech at the Swiss mountain resort yesterday, Trump said Canada “gets a lot of freebies from us,” and that “Canada lives because of the United States.”

“Remember that, Mark, next time you make your statements.”

‘Remember that’: Yikes – and exactly. A framework for a deal over Greenland might calm the waters for a while, but it doesn’t change the tide. U.S. threats against long-time economic and wartime allies have shattered assumptions that have underpinned the global order since the Second World War.

Trump might not have referenced Athenian historians in his remarks, but his caution wasn’t so distant from Carney’s message the day before. For decades, Carney said, America as a superpower delivered benefits for many middle powers – open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security – but only because the U.S. chose to participate.

“Call the system what it is: a period of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as a weapon of coercion,” Carney said.

“We probably won’t get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be, frankly, unstoppable,” Trump said a day later.

Conscious uncoupling: (Remember that? Coldplay is responsible for some strange contributions to cultural discourse.)

Trump and Carney seem to be agreeing, if aggressively so, that the countries are moving in different directions. Carney outlined how Canada, which has an economy predicated almost entirely on free and open access to the U.S., was among the first to see a disruption under way. In both Carney’s speech and a recent string of deals in China and Qatar, Canada has effectively changed its relationship status to “It’s Complicated.”

His next destination is India, where the two countries will launch formal negotiations toward an economic partnership agreement after years of diplomatic tension.

The U.S. will always be Canada’s largest trading partner, but Carney is on a mission to double exports shipped to other countries over the next decade. The U.S. expects its allies to follow its tough-on-China stand, but economists say that goal can’t be achieved without China’s help.

Reaching new trade deals without upsetting an erratic Trump administration will require Canada to walk an increasingly precarious path leading up to the USMCA renegotiations in July.

One last thing: This kinda flew under the radar, but the chief executive of Claude-maker Anthropic said the U.S. is making a “big mistake” in allowing chip-making giant Nvidia Corp. to ship its advanced technology to China. In an interview at Davos, Dario Amodei said the decision will have “incredible national security implications.”

“I think this is crazy. It’s a bit like selling nuclear weapons to North Korea.”

Amodei’s remarks show either he’s extremely principled about U.S. security or extremely confident that Nvidia will continue to support the company after announcing in November it would invest US$10-billion in the artificial intelligence startup.