STRATEGY SEEKS ACCESS TO PANAMA, GREENLAND: Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney took a lot of grief for his remarks at Davos last week, in which he declared the international rules-based order — which has guided the U.S. view of how nations should act since the end of World War II — a “fiction” that has been irreparably ruptured and replaced by an era of “great power rivalry,” where “strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.”

While Trump was irritated by Carney’s description of a world where major powers such as the U.S. impose their will on middle powers through economic coercion and tariffs, the Pentagon’s new National Defense Strategy, released late Friday, embraces the idea that the U.S. top dog and will no longer be “distracted by interventionism, endless wars, regime change, and nation building.”