Carney and Stubb: Two centrist dads trying to save the world 

The leaders of Canada and Finland are running partners and friends who text each other regularly. Can they build a new transatlantic alliance in the age of Trump? 

By TIM ROSS and MICKEY DJURIC
in OTTAWA, Canada

^{Photo-Illustration by Natália Delgado/POLITICO}

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and Finnish President Alexander Stubb were born three years and 4,000 miles apart. 

But Donald Trump’s detonation of the rules-based order in 2026 has lashed them together as the intellectual leaders of a new counter-movement offering a way for centrist liberals to survive the storm.

They are increasingly aligned on the world stage — quoting each other in their speeches and sharing opinions on the broken global order and how smaller countries can cooperate better on defense and market power. They talk in private by phone and text message regularly. 

Last month, when they found themselves in London at the same time, Carney and Stubb swapped texts and arranged to go jogging together in Hyde Park, somewhat to the surprise of their respective entourages.

“We call each other and message quite frequently,” Stubb, a triathlete, told POLITICO in Helsinki a few days later. “We write to each other, we try and reflect what’s going on in the world, so it’s that type of a friendship. And then we can go out on an occasional run as well, which is nice.” 

“I am not going to be doing any triathlons with President Stubb, that would be quite embarrassing from my perspective,” Carney said Tuesday when asked by POLITICO about the friendship as Stubb arrived in Ottawa for talks. “He is a remarkable individual with many talents.” 

Carney also said he valued “the deep relationship” and the “alignment” between the two on “a huge range of issues.” Together, he added, the two countries are facing up to the “disorder in the international system to rebuild a better system that works for the people of Canada, the people of Finland and the people of the world.” 

Nowadays, Canadians and Finns each face hostile and unpredictable neighbors, raising the stakes of diplomacy to existential levels.

Carney’s superpower to the south makes ominous jokes about wanting to incorporate Canada as its 51st state and has embarked on an economically damaging war in the Middle East with no clear resolution in sight. 

Finland’s neighbor to the east is four years into a war of aggression against Ukraine, menacing the waters of the Baltic and targeting countries across Europe with hybrid attacks. 

Stubb, a 58-year-old liberal conservative with a son and a daughter, and Carney, 61, the leader of Canada’s Liberal Party and a father of four girls, find themselves in power at a profoundly perilous moment for the world. 

A person who has seen Stubb and Carney together said there was clearly “very good chemistry” between them. “They share a way of thinking and their values, of course, but they also both have an operative mindset that’s geared toward finding solutions,” said this person, granted anonymity to speak freely.

This week, Stubb is visiting Ottawa, where the pair will continue their conversations face-to-face. Over meetings and a private working dinner, they are due to reflect on the state of the world, including how to end the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, and the ongoing impact of Trump’s tumultuous second term.

As transatlantic relations slip deeper into crisis, the future of what used to be called the liberal world order could depend on the ideas these two centrist dads discuss between themselves.

Tackling Trump

Stubb and Carney both love hockey. Stubb even watched football on TV with another centrist dad leader, British PM Keir Starmer, on that same trip to London. 

Like Starmer, both Carney and Stubb are bookish and thoughtful and have enjoyed significant success in life outside politics — Carney as a central banker, and Stubb in diplomacy and academia, as well as high-level amateur sport.

“I respect Mark a lot — I think he is one of the most intellectually astute world leaders we have right now,” Stubb told POLITICO. “I think we have a fairly similar background, the difference being that he’s an economist and I’m an international relations buff. We both have our Ph.D.s in our respective subjects and we both share a love of ice hockey. Canada and Finland have always been of similar minds so I’ve been fortunate to land a good relationship with Mark.” 

But when it comes to Trump, the two men have had different experiences.

Carney came to power in 2025 vowing to stand up to Trump and fight for Canadian sovereignty in the face of his territorial and economic threats. Stubb, by contrast, found himself with the label of Europe’s “Trump whisperer” after getting to know the American president on his Florida golf course, and consolidating that relationship with calls, texts and meetings since. 

Despite his country’s relatively small population of 5.6 million, Stubb has enjoyed outsized influence in Washington, though he says he speaks a little less often to Trump since the outbreak of war in the Middle East. 

So far, 2026 has been the year of Trumpian geopolitical upheaval, from Venezuela to Greenland, European relations and now the war in Iran. 

It was also the year Carney and Stubb emerged as the intellectual leaders navigating a potential pathway for allies to survive in a dangerous new era of great power politics.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos in January, Carney delivered a speech that shook ski-booted prime ministers and CEOs out of their complacency and forced them to face up to the profound Trumpian rupture of the world order. 

“Stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised,” Carney declared. “Call it what it is: A system of intensifying great power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.”

And it was to Stubb whom Carney turned for his solution: “Our new approach rests on what Alexander Stubb, the President of Finland, has termed ‘value-based realism.’”

A week earlier, Stubb had published his latest book on international affairs, “The Triangle of Power: Rebalancing the New World Order.” 

This is where he set out his idea of “values-based realism” as a tool for navigating the present upheaval. “Our path toward a steadier future starts with seeing the world as it is,” Stubb wrote. “And defining a way to hold our liberal values while working humbly and respectfully with those who do not share them.” 

Carney was blunt in his conclusion in Davos. “We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

Like Stubb, Carney also offered a more hopeful avenue to build something “more just” where the old illusion of a rules-based order used to be. “This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and most to gain from genuine cooperation,” he said. “The powerful have their power. But we have something too – the capacity to stop pretending, to name reality, to build our strength at home and to act together.” 

The two men agree in their analysis but have differences in style. Where Carney’s oratory rises to impassioned heights, Stubb is proud to be a cool, calm and collected Finn. But they are both convinced that the way forward for countries like theirs is to cooperate. 

What might this cooperation among middle powers look like? And could it ever be enough to replace American leadership in NATO and other key alliances? 

In short: a lot of convenient marriages. 

Centrist dad club

When it comes to NATO, of which both Finland and Canada are members, Stubb is clear that European countries must and will club together to deliver security for Europe within the alliance, regardless of whether America walks away.

Finnish leaders do not want to undermine the credibility of NATO, which they only recently joined, in part because they are a frontline state facing down Moscow’s simmering hostility toward Europe, sharing an 800-mile border with Russia. 

In Helsinki last month, Stubb hosted Starmer and a group of other leaders from northern European countries for a day of discussions about defense. Among them was Rob Jetten, the new liberal Prime Minister of the Netherlands, whom Stubb presented with a birthday cake. And dialing in from across the Atlantic, of course, was Carney, who was “fully part of the conversation,” according to one official present during the talks.

That grouping, known as the Joint Expeditionary Force, aims to act as a European rapid-response military option to support NATO, though there are suggestions its role could expand. 

While Canada is not likely to become a full member of the JEF, it may yet formalize its association with the group. 

Then there is the European Union. During their run in the park in London, Stubb suggested to Carney that he should think about Canada joining the EU, an idea that bubbles up regularly — and apparently enjoys the support of nearly half of Canadians. 

Carney has said full EU membership is not likely, though he does want deeper trade and security ties with the bloc. And Stubb will be on board with that just as he wants the U.K. to scrap Brexit and return to what he says is its rightful place inside the EU. 

Amid a tariff war with the U.S., Canada is showing what diversification of alliances really means. It already has a trade agreement with the EU, though not all 27 governments have ratified it yet. But this year alone Carney reached a major trade agreement with China and a clutch of new overarching deals with India, including a 10-year accord on nuclear energy. 

The Finnish president is bringing a delegation of more than 30 businesses to Canada this week: Companies from defense, maritime and mining industries will be making connections in Ottawa as the two leaders renew their discussions.

Endurance tests

There are clearly limits, of course. Canada and Finland are medium and small countries, not superpowers, either economically or militarily. Their common values are clear, but the “realism” of their size is equally obvious. 

To those who struggle to see much hope amid the global upheavals, Stubb suggests staying calm and behaving like a Finn: “Take an ice bath, visit a sauna, and reflect,” as he put it in the introduction to his book. He is an endurance athlete, and often propounds Finland’s concept of resilience, or grit, using a word with no direct English translation: “Sisu.” 

In the face of Trump’s threats, Carney this month described how millions of small individual acts of solidarity — such as buying Canadian wine instead of imported bottles from California, or taking vacations in Canada rather than Florida — are renewing his country’s strength. “Together they make a statement,” Carney said. “We are the masters of our destiny.”

If destiny is also geography, the deepening friendship between Carney and Stubb may owe something to a sense of place. The towns of their birth, Fort Smith and Helsinki, lie on exactly the same latitude: 60 degrees North.

Inhabitants of both must endure months of unforgiving cold, with winter temperatures falling below -20 degrees Celsius. And there is surely no more Finnish sentiment to be found anywhere in North America than the one-word motto of Carney’s home town: “Perseverence.”