Mark Carney is making an eloquent case for an alliance sidelining the US | Ted Widmer

The Canadian prime minister's remarks before the European parliament outlined a vision of the west without its most powerful member

The speeches keep coming, each building on the previous one, as the Canadian prime minister builds a case for a new world order that has strikingly little to do with the United States of America, the country that has led the west since the second world war.

On 20 January, in Davos, Mark Carney proposed that the world's middle powers do more to support each other, in light of a rupture" in the global order. That was clearly a reference to the destabilizing policies of Donald Trump, who had been inaugurated exactly one year earlier, and had spent most of that year insulting the US's allies.