On a far-flung archipelago in the North Atlantic Ocean, a smiling Emmanuel Macron waited for Mark Carney to step off his maple-leaf-branded Challenger 650 jet and onto the last surviving remnant of France’s former North American empire.

It was a crisp Sunday morning in September, and this was an unusual, inconvenient detour. Neither man had a practical reason to visit Saint Pierre and Miquelon, sparsely inhabited islands that were once pawns in the late-18th-century colonial contest between France and Britain. The French president and Canada’s prime minister were both traveling to New York the next day for the United Nations General Assembly. This would be their first visit to the islands, and probably their last.

The islands’ enduring relevance was their location, just 25 kilometers (16 miles) off the coast of Newfoundland. That makes us neighbors, Macron said, standing next to Carney on the tarmac: “Our republic in your continent.”This was classic Jupiterian Macron, a magnificent gesture typical of a leader whose checkered, decade-long rule over the Fifth Republic will end after elections next spring.

With protests brewing at home that would within weeks explode into violence, and with his domestic reformist zeal extinguished by political stalemate, the Saint Pierre and Miquelon meeting was a bid to show the world that Macron had lost none of his swagger.

But Macron knows the finish line is coming into view. Despite his grand ambitions to bend the future of Europe to his will, he will step aside in 2027 with the Continent — and France — a more volatile and unstable place than when he first won power in 2017.

In Carney, the new figurehead of the global center ground, a champion of the “middle powers” and a leader who governs Canada with the energy of a chief executive officer, Macron had found a kindred spirit. “We see the present from the same angle,” Macron said in Saint-Pierre. “History remembers those who act, those who defend their sovereignty, those who remain faithful to their values,” Carney replied in fluent French.

Four days earlier, in Strasbourg, France, the Canadian leader had received another invitation, this one from European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, to join the world’s largest trade bloc as an “associate member.”Even though it is not yet clear exactly what that might entail, the European Union, it seems, considers Carney one of its own.

“In this new world, we must urgently reimagine our partnerships and build global coalitions for our resilience and democracies,” von der Leyen said in her annual state of the union address on Sept. 16. This week she traveled with a high-powered EU delegation to meet Carney in Montreal for a summit designed to begin establishing exactly what that relationship might look like in practice.

The EU’s overture was evidence of how badly the old transatlantic alliance with the US has run aground, scuppered by President Donald Trump’s hostility to the security arrangements that have underpinned peace and prosperity in Europe since 1945. At the same time, Trump’s public belittling of Canada, and his jokes about turning the world’s second-largest country into the 51st US state, had pushed Canada and the EU closer together than ever. By bringing Carney to Saint-Pierre, Macron sought to bathe Europe’s dimming star in the bright lights of Carney’s rising one.

For years, Macron has sought to create a bigger, bolder, confident Europe, more capable of defending itself and less dependent on Washington and Beijing. When Trump began declaring in 2024 that he wanted to swallow up Canada, he supercharged Canadian politics, helping ensure Carney’s victory the following April and meaning that Macron, entering his final year as president, would have a like-minded ally across the Atlantic.

That potential came into focus at Davos in January 2026, where Carney used his address to the World Economic Forum to issue a now-famous clarion call to the world’s middle powers. As one diplomat in Brussels wryly notes in private, it was a bit embarrassing to admit that the bloc needed Carney to start believing in itself.

Still, Canadian officials were clear after Davos that their new alliances would be global ones, and their outreach included the likes of Australia, India and Turkey. By the time Carney visited Strasbourg in September, his grand strategy had contours of its own. “I want to be precise about what I am not proposing,” he said, allowing himself a sly dig at the US. “I am not proposing a third bloc in order to become a great-power rival, only with better manners.”

Yet since Davos, few so-called middle powers — nations ranging from post-Brexit UK to Australia, Japan and South Korea, as well as individual EU members — have formally rallied to Carney’s cause. He remains locked in a punishing trade war with the US, though negotiations have resumed after efforts to broker a deal with Trump collapsed over the summer.

“This won’t be easy, and I won’t pretend otherwise,” Carney told his nation in September. Just as Macron cannot ignore Europe’s vulnerability without US security guarantees, Carney cannot escape the reality that his country shares the world’s longest international land border with its superpower neighbor.

Macron and Carney are bound by more than their overlapping tenures at the helm of Group of Seven nations. Both are former investment bankers who have tried to bring a business sensibility to politics. And both delight in literary and philosophical references. After becoming prime minister in 2025, Carney flew straight to Paris and made meeting with Macron an immediate priority.

At times, Macron’s confidence, or hubris, is reminiscent of Charles de Gaulle’s. As president of France, de Gaulle repeatedly denied the UK entry to early pan-European communities and railed about US dominance of NATO. He egged on the Quebecois to break free, something even Macron has been mindful not to do.

As governor of the Bank of England during the Brexit era, Carney witnessed firsthand how vital relationships unraveled, especially when the Franco-British relationship descended into rancor.

Years later, the EU can see a similar unwinding taking place. Like Canada, like Greenland and even like Venezuela — now turned into a vassal state by Trump — Europe finds itself squeezed economically by the US rivalry with China. The urgency to establish new alliances and security arrangements has only increased as Europe continues to offer dogged support for Ukraine, even as Trump grows increasingly skeptical of its ability to prevail against Russia.

Yet Carney and Macron realize there is no upside to poking the bear; they also know that being a sycophant doesn’t win you any special favors either. As Macron’s era fades, Carney finds himself on the front line in standing up to the US president.

More than a month after the handshake and smiles on Saint-Pierre, the Montreal summit on Oct. 29 and Oct. 30 is the first real test of the new EU-Canada relationship. Von der Leyen and European Council President António Costa, accompanied by up to 10 European commissioners, are discussing how to bring Canada as close to the union as possible without it actually becoming a member. Europe is clear that a bespoke solution is needed, according to a senior official with knowledge of the planning: The EU does not see itself as a middle power, though its individual member states may do.

The key question is what a closer relationship could look like. No one, not least Macron or Carney, knows or wants to be drawn into the details. One diplomat, in closed-door discussions ahead of the summit, said there were many questions about what associated membership would entail, and some countries are troubled by it. One diplomat described the concept as essentially a blank page. EU member states eventually removed the term from the summit’s draft conclusions, even as von der Leyen continued to champion the idea.

If the details remain elusive, the enthusiasm does not. In an interview with Bloomberg Television on Oct. 19, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz called Canada “as European as it was never before.”The test, though, will be how the warm words translate into concrete action. European leaders may be inclined to rewire their alliances — even UK Prime Minister Andy Burnham is openly courting the bloc and talking of reversing Brexit — but domestic political turmoil threatens to distract from the work of building those relationships.

Merz is on the ropes, with the far-right Alternative for Germany handing his conservative Christian Democratic Union party damaging losses in recent state elections. Though Merz and Macron have attempted to show a united front in public, the traditional Franco-German axis, which for decades underpinned the entire European political and economic project, is barely functioning. Some of the euro area’s biggest economies — from Spain to Greece, via Italy and France — all face the prospect of the far-right advancing in the coming year.

France itself is locked in a political and fiscal straitjacket, but Macron is turning a blind eye to the whiff of revolution in the French air and the prospect of far-right nationalist Marine Le Pen succeeding him in the Élysée. As Paris burned on Oct. 17, he was in the Middle East, still playing the great statesman.

In Montreal, a city with a European feel and French roots, Carney and Europe are attempting to chart a new course, one that seizes on the promise of the middle-powers doctrine and somehow rewrites Europe’s own faltering script. If it works, September’s brief meeting on a speck of land in the Atlantic might be remembered for more than warm words and beaming smiles.

Addressing the European Parliament in September, Carney switched seamlessly between German, French and English. Drawing on Goethe’s Elective Affinities and the laws of chemical reaction, he reflected on why countries, like people, are drawn to each other. “We are bound by an affinity — elective, chosen and renewed, and stronger for being so,” he said. “An alliance not defined by what we oppose, but about what we are for.”