Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney addressed the Australian parliament yesterday, as part of a visit that has been the subject of some anticipation.
Carney’s address and his other remarks in Australia have served primarily to highlight the threadbare character of his suggestions that Canada, Australia and other “middle order powers” can chart a way forward in opposition to the breakdown of the “rules based order” and increasingly flagrant illegally in international relations.
Carney repeated those talking points. But the most striking aspect of his trip was the total support he extended to the criminal US-Israeli bombardment of Iran, which overshadowed it. In that, Carney was joined by Labor Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, who, having been among the first world leaders to have endorsed the war of aggression, has now gone further, explicitly backing regime change.
At a press conference after the parliamentary address, both Carney and Albanese brushed off suggestions that they would call for a ceasefire, under conditions of a US carpet bombing of Iran that has acquired a genocidal character.
Both said there needed to be a “deescalation,” but immediately made clear they were referring to Iran’s defensive response to the unprovoked attack against it. “We're seeing Gulf states that have not been involved attacked across the board,” Albanese stated, as though he were unaware that Iran was firing on US bases, from which the attacks on it are being launched.
“We also want to see the objectives achieved,” Albanese added. “I want to see the possibility of Iran getting a nuclear weapon removed once and for all. And I also want to see a removal of the ongoing threat that has been there for such a long period of time, of Iran endangering peace and security and stability.”
Iran has never had a nuclear weapon, and just days before launching war against it, US President Donald Trump had declared that its uranium enrichment program had already been “obliterated” by US strikes last year. But aside from repeating all of the lying talking points of Trump, Albanese was clearly endorsing regime change, which means a massive war that will span months, if not years, aimed at reestablishing open colonial control over Iran.
Both Albanese and Carney, who repeated the same lies, were speaking the day after US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth had pledged “death and destruction from the sky all day long,” waged “decisively, devastatingly and without mercy,” in a fascist tirade effectively calling for the annihilation of Iranian society.
Carney’s planned visit was announced shortly after he had delivered an explosive speech to the World Economic Forum at Davos last January. Carney had warned of “a rupture of the world order” and the beginning of “a brutal reality where geopolitics among the great powers is not subject to any constraints.” Carney introduced the conception that “middle order powers” would have a crucial role to play in preventing a complete descent into the abyss.
At Davos, Carney did not directly criticise the Trump administration, but it was clear enough that he was referencing the destabilising consequences of its “America First” program targeting foes and erstwhile allies alike. The speech was made under conditions of open conflicts between the US and the European NATO powers, amid Trump’s threats to seize Greenland from Denmark and his aggressive demands on European allies.
In Australia, while the speech received little coverage, Albanese and other senior Labor leaders expressed sympathy with it. That was striking given Australia’s lockstep alliance with the US and in the limited commentary, there were suggestions that the favourable reception of the government to Carney’s speech may mark a shift in Australia’s foreign policy alignments.
The Australian ruling elite, like its counterparts internationally, faces a series of intractable contradictions.
It is strategically dependent on its alliance with American imperialism to prosecute its own predatory interests particularly in the Pacific, and successive Australian governments have transformed the country into a staging post for a US-led war against China. But at the same time, Beijing remains Australia’s largest trading partner and there are no obvious replacements.
As for Canada, it has been hit with the unprecedented situation of its closest ally, the US, threatening a takeover of the country while imposing substantial tariffs.
For all of that, the essential message of the trip, from both Carney and Albanese, was that they would continue to prosecute their own imperialist interests under the umbrella of the US alliance.
The tone was set by Carney’s first address at the Lowy Institute think tank on Wednesday evening. Carney began by repeating a number of his Davos talking points, including a thinly veiled swipe at Trump’s program of economic war, and declared: “Geostrategically, hegemons are increasingly acting without constraint or respect for international norms or laws, while others bear the consequences.”
But that was directly followed, not by a denunciation of the world’s chief hegemon for having launched an illegal war days earlier, but by a frothing and hysterical condemnation of the victim, Iran. Carney repeated the lies of an Iranian nuclear threat. His condemnation of the “international order,” on this occasion, was primarily that the United Nations and other institutions had failed to secure the complete subjugation of Iran.
In that speech, as well as his address to parliament, it was clear enough that Carney was not referring to a break by the “middle order powers” with US imperialism, much less some sort of confrontation with it. Instead, he was calling for them to play a more active role in criminal imperialist machinations and intrigues, essentially under the umbrella of the US alliance.
“Middle powers like Canada—and I would suggest Australia—should recognise that the rupture in the international system represents just that, a clear break from the past, and we need to act decisively to secure our shared future,” Carney told the Lowy Institute.
His address to the Australian parliament was an expansion of the same theme. Following mind-numbing banalities about the purported commonalities of Canada and Australia, Carney declared that Canada was “choosing to create a dense web of connections to build our resilience.” This was not a departure from its previous “multilateralism,” i.e., within the framework of the US alliance, but an attempt to “demonstrate the power of multilateralism and reinvigorate it.”
The primary areas that he outlined related to war. Carney emphasised the importance of critical minerals development, under conditions where Australia and Canada both hold vast reserves. He touted a deepening of defence ties between supposedly like-minded countries, such as Canada and Australia. He also called for the expansion of artificial intelligence industries in both countries.
Carney presented these policies, as well as trade diversification and ties and the harnessing of private capital, as means for “middle powers” to ensure “sovereign capabilities” and “strategic autonomy,” because “When the rules no longer protect you, you must defend yourself.”
Carney and Albanese signed a series of agreements, which several commentators have noted are “broad” but not particularly “deep.” They include vague commitments to expand cooperation across critical minerals, defence and trade.
Notwithstanding the substantial reserves of critical minerals in both countries, which are crucial to the production of virtually all advanced technologies, neither has a processing capability and that is unlikely to change in the near future. Last October, Albanese signed a far-reaching deal with Trump for extensive cooperation on critical minerals, meaning that “capability” is far from “sovereign.”
The reality of Australia’s deepgoing integration into the US-led war machine was revealed during Carney’s visit itself. It was confirmed that two Australian defence personnel were onboard a US nuclear-powered submarine that struck an Iranian warship off the coast of Sri Lanka. Australia, in other words, was directly involved in that war crime and in the broader imperialist assault that is underway. Australian personnel are stationed on a series of US assets, as part of the AUKUS pact against China, under which Australia is supposed to receive its own fleet of nuclear-powered submarines from the US.
As for Carney, the fact that he did not express a word of direct criticism of Trump spoke volumes about his limited ability, as a representative of a “middle power,” to advance any alternative to alignment with an American imperialism that is at the centre of the assault on old diplomatic and international norms.
Carney and Albanese are among the most enthusiastic supporters of the war that is underway, under conditions where even a host of US allies in Europe have expressed fears over the destabilising implications of the historic crime that is underway.