Europe will not submit to an ‘insular and brutal world’, says Carney

Original article by Patrick Wintour in Yerevan

Europe will not submit to a more “brutal world”, and can instead be the base from which a new international order can be rebuilt, Mark Carney, the Canadian prime minister, has said.

Carney was speaking as the first non-European leader to attend a meeting of the European Political Community, which opened on Monday amid high tensions in the strait of Hormuz and renewed doubts about the US commitment to Nato.

“We don’t think that we’re destined to submit to a more transactional, insular and brutal world, and gatherings such as these point to a better way forward,” he said.

In a pointed suggestion that the era of American leadership was coming to an end, and explaining the symbolism of Canada’s attendance at a European political gathering, he said: “It is my strong personal view that the international order will be rebuilt, but it will be rebuilt out of Europe.

“We are demonstrating not just the strength of our values in defending a rules-based international order, but also the value of our strength,” he added. “The world is undergoing a rupture across several dimensions – integration is being used as a weapon by some and the rules are not constraining the hegemons.”

The EPC meeting, the eighth since the organisation’s inception, is taking place in Yerevan, Armenia, a venue chosen as a way of showing Europe’s determination to prevent the small Caucasus country from being dragged back into Russia’s orbit.

It is being held against a backdrop of fresh concern over the US’s commitment to Nato after Donald Trump’s surprise decision to announce the withdrawal of more than 5,000 troops from Germany, a move that has confirmed Europeans’ worst fears about the reliability of the transatlantic alliance.

Speaking in Yerevan, Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, said: “We cannot deny some of the alliances that we have come to rely on are not in the place where we would want them to be. There is more tension in the alliances than there should be.”

How leaders responded to tensions in the alliances was likely to “define what goes on for many years, arguably for a generation”, he added.

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, said: “Europeans are taking their destiny into their own hands, increasing their defence and security spending, and building their own common solutions.”

The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, said Russia would face a crucial moment in the summer, which he termed “a moment to expand the war or move to diplomacy”.

He said if Russia did not chose to end the war it was all the more vital that sanctions packages were not lifted. He called for a workable diplomatic format in which Europeans must be at the table at any talks.

As well as removing 5,000 soldiers from Germany, Trump has also suggested he might pull troops also from Italy and Spain over the governments of those countries not showing sufficient support for US-Israeli operations against Iran.

As of the end of 2025 there were 36,436 active-duty US troops in Germany, 12,662 in Italy and 3,814 in Spain.

Discussing the planned troop withdrawal from Germany, the EU’s foreign policy chief, Kaja Kallas, said there had been talk about withdrawal of US troops for a long time from Europe but that “the timing of this announcement comes as a surprise. I think it shows that we have to really strengthen the European pillar in Nato.”

Asked whether she believed that Trump was trying to punish the German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, for saying the US had been “humiliated” by Iran in talks to end the war, Kallas said: “I don’t see into the head of President Trump, so he has to explain it himself.”

Merz himself skipped the Yerevan summit. On Sunday he told a TV interviewer he was “not giving up…on the transatlantic relationship. Nor am I giving up on working with Donald Trump.”

NATO chief Mark Rutte admitted there had “been some disappointment on the US side” over Europe’s reluctance to get behind the Iran war.

But Europeans had “heard the message”, were now providing logistical support to US operations and pre-positioning “key assets close to theatre, for the next phase”, Rutte told reporters.