Great white hopes
A PAIR of North American leaders delivered remarkably different speeches in Switzerland last week. Donald Trump’s address was a largely predictable, self-aggrandising rant that ranged from justifications for his claim on Greenland (or possibly Iceland) to a racist diatribe against Somalis, interpolated with denunciations of Joe Biden. Mark Carney acknowledged that the rules-based international order was always partially fictitious, and that the rupture cannot be reversed.
The Canadian PM uttered some truths that most of his European counterparts would struggle to enunciate. Carney has, therefore, widely been hailed as a viable anti-Trump by the usual centrists and some progressives. He called upon middle powers to act together in dealing with the foremost hegemon, “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu”. But Denmark has been at the table, yet Greenland is on the menu.
Since last week, Trump has seemingly rescinded his invasion plan and dropped the threat of increased tariffs against European nations that resisted his acquisition of Greenland, citing a ‘framework agreement’ with Nato for establishing military bases (which would anyhow have been possible). Details are still murky, although Guantánamo Bay has been cited as a possible model. The lesson many analysts have drawn is that, like a typical bully, Trump backs down in the face of resolute resistance. If it’s as simple as that, one is forced to wonder why he has not been challenged more frequently.
It is notable, meanwhile, that there wasn’t even a passing mention of Israel or Gaza — under whose rubble the last vestiges of any international order lie buried, alongside the bones of Palestinian children, women and men — in Carney’s oration. Perhaps because Canada has been complicit in the genocide, alongside various other Anglophone or European nations. It is also notable that whereas a bunch of European countries turned down membership of Trump’s ridiculous Board of Peace (BoP) on the basis that an invitation had been extended to Vladimir Putin, none of them cited the inclusion of Benjamin Netanyahu, a genocidal maniac by any measure, as a sufficient cause for steering clear of the imperial entity.
Neither Trump nor Carney offers a solution.
The BoP charter attested at Davos by Trump with the same flamboyance as his birthday greetings to Jeffrey Epstein was signed with a bunch of supplicants hovering in the background, much like the farce at Sharm el-Sheikh last October. The BoP was stupidly endorsed by the UN Security Council last year, when it was considered purely a Gaza-related initiative. The charter doesn’t mention the Israeli-devastated territory at all, but the draft text of its first resolution, revealed on Monday, offers disturbing details.
Even Israel-approved Palestinians are relegated to the fourth tier of the arbitrary structure with Trump at its helm for as long he wishes (or gets bored with peace), with a broad range of reprobates in the higher echelons of this travesty. Trump’s ghostly son-in-law Jared Kushner laid out a bizarre plan at Davos, reinforcing the impression that Palestinians barely matter (except as a potential labour force) in the reconstruction of Gaza as a tourist resort. The UAE will reportedly bankroll a Potemkin village in Rafah to house 25,000 Palestinians vetted by their overlords, and biometrically scanned each time they move in or out of their abodes. A hi-tech refugee camp, in other words.
The enablers, by and large, are autocratic states eager to participate in a global kakistocracy. The fate of Gaza has been handed over to real-estate agents. More than half of the narrow strip is already under Israeli control, and that’s where any construction activity might take place. The ceasefire that Trump crows about has been followed by almost 500 murders by the Israel Defence Forces, including children and journalists, and the demolition of thousands of buildings. The genocide never ended, and the BoP has a recipe for completing it.
At Davos, the US president trumpeted his stature as the self-ordained saviour of Western civilisation. The Canadian PM took a different tack but cast himself in a similar role. Frankly, neither of them fits the bill as a great white hope, with one proclaiming a new world disorder and the other lamenting a status quo ante that benefited the few and dispossessed the many.
Nor does either of them offer a viable vision for the future. The actor Jackie Chan recently revealed that he broke down while watching a video in which a Palestinian child was asked, “What will you be when you grow up?”, and the boy nonchalantly responded: “Children on our side don’t grow up.”
It’s impossible to hold back the tears, but I doubt it would evoke a similar response in either of the great white hopes. If a better world is possible, neither Trump nor Carney will be part of it.
Published in Dawn, January 28th, 2026