Countries caught between competing superpowers should join forces to protect their economic interests and what is left of “the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules,” Prime Minister Mark Carney said Tuesday in a speech to the World Economic Forum as U.S. President Donald Trump ramped up his threats to take over Greenland.

“Middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” Carney said onstage at the annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland, where he received a rare standing ovation from the crowd after he was done.

Though Carney never spoke his name, Trump’s presence loomed large in an address that described Canada’s plight in some of the bluntest terms the prime minister has used, while mapping a course forward for mid-level economies adjusting to an altered world. 

“Great powers” are “using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage,” he said, while middle powers cannot. “But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness,” Carney said before adding: “This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty, while accepting subordination.”

Canada was an early target of the disruption wrought by Trump, through steep universal tariffs linked to dubious claims about fentanyl, plus threats of annexation. It was among “the first to hear the wake-up call” that the international rules-based order—an idea many knew to be partly false—is fading, said Carney. Canadians, he said, can no longer assume where they live, or their alliances, bring automatic security and prosperity.

In his speech, which spokesperson Audrey Champoux told The Logic he wrote largely himself, Carney highlighted how the federal government has moved to speed up infrastructure projects, boost defence spending and diversify trade—including interprovincially and with China. He encouraged other countries to co-operate as they reduce their own vulnerabilities, rather than leaning further into protectionism or negotiating deals that undermine the system they rely on.

“We shouldn’t allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity and rules will remain strong if we choose to wield them together,” Carney said.

Carney reprised a familiar pitch to the heavy hitters in the room to do business with Canada, which he called “an energy superpower” with critical minerals, a highly educated workforce and sophisticated pension funds. (Finance Minister François-Philippe Champagne was more direct on a panel earlier Tuesday: “When you talk to CEOs today, what do they want? Stability, predictability and the rule of law,” he said. “I would say it’s in short supply, and Canada has an abundance of it.”)

Yet this year’s World Economic Forum takes place as Trump cranks up pressure on Denmark to let the U.S. acquire Greenland, even threatening tariffs on eight NATO countries after they sent troops to the semi-autonomous Arctic territory. Overnight, Trump posted an illustration with a map showing the American flag over Greenland, Venezuela—and Canada.

“On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland’s future,” Carney said to applause. He also said that Canada’s commitment to Article 5 of NATO, which is the principle that an armed attack on one member of the alliance is considered an attack against all, is “unwavering.”

Throughout his speech, Carney referenced a 1978 essay by Václav Havel, the Czech dissident who went on to become his country’s first democratically elected leader after the fall of the Soviet bloc. In that essay, “The Power of the Powerless,” Havel argued that communism sustained itself because ordinary people went along with things they knew to be false, which he called “living within a lie.”

It is time for middle powers, as well as companies, to stop doing that, Carney argued in the speech, which prompted applause. “Call it what it is: A system of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.”