A new axis in global trade is taking shape. Mark Carney, Canada's newly elected Prime Minister, is driving talks between the European Union and the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership — the CPTPP — toward a major new trade pact, according to a report by Politico Europe. The explicit purpose: to pool economic weight against Washington's tariff offensive.
The CPTPP is not a minor regional arrangement. It encompasses 11 nations — including Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Mexico, Vietnam, Singapore, Malaysia, Chile, Peru, Brunei and Canada itself — covering a combined GDP approaching $14 trillion. Set alongside the EU's $18 trillion economy, a formal partnership between these two blocs would represent one of the largest trade alignments ever constructed. More to the point, it would represent an alignment explicitly built around the assumption that the United States is no longer a reliable anchor of the liberal trading order it helped create.
<h2>Carney's Calculation</h2>
For Carney, the architecture is both economic and political. Canada has been battered by American tariffs — a particularly bitter experience for a country whose economy is structurally intertwined with the United States through the CUSMA trade agreement. Carney's election campaign was built in part on the argument that Canada must diversify away from American dependency. Brokering a deal that places Canada's CPTPP membership as a bridge to the EU is the most dramatic expression of that strategy.
It also serves a political purpose that goes beyond trade flow calculations. In calling for "middle powers" to join forces, Carney is consciously constructing a political identity for a post-American international order — one in which countries like Canada, Japan, Australia and the EU member states present themselves as the custodians of open trade, rules-based dispute resolution, and multilateral norms. The implicit argument: someone has to fill the vacuum, and it might as well be us.
<h2>The EU's Position</h2>
For Brussels, the proposition is attractive but not without complication. The EU has its own outstanding trade tensions with CPTPP members — notably the long-running disputes over agricultural access with Australia and New Zealand that have previously complicated trade negotiations. An EU-CPTPP framework agreement would require navigating those fault lines as well as agreeing on rules of origin, services access, and intellectual property standards across an enormous diversity of regulatory regimes.
EU Trade Commissioner Maros Sefcovic has been vocal about the need to respond to American tariff pressure through new partnerships rather than retaliation alone. The Commission's trade agenda for 2026 has been openly framed as a diversification strategy, with concluded deals with Mexico and Mercosur being pushed through and new dialogues opened with partners in Southeast Asia and the Indo-Pacific. A formal EU-CPTPP dialogue fits squarely within that framework — which is presumably why Carney's approach has received a warm, if cautious, reception in Brussels.
<h2>What the Alliance Would Actually Do</h2>
Terminology matters here, because the word "mega-alliance" risks overselling what is, at least initially, a political signal rather than a concluded treaty. What is being discussed is the opening of structured dialogue between the EU and the CPTPP — the first step in a process that, if it proceeds to formal negotiation and then ratification, would take years.
But the political signal itself is consequential. Three things would happen immediately upon an announced framework: first, it would strengthen the hand of those within the CPTPP — notably Japan and Australia — who want closer regulatory alignment with European standards, not American ones. Second, it would give EU negotiators new leverage in ongoing conversations with Washington: Brussels and its partners represent a market of 1.5 billion consumers, and a unified trade front changes the arithmetic for American exporters. Third, it would demonstrate that the institutional architecture of free trade can be rebuilt around different nodes, without Washington at the centre.
<h2>The British Dimension</h2>
London has its own CPTPP membership, having joined the bloc in 2024 in what was presented at the time as a post-Brexit vindication. The emergence of an EU-CPTPP partnership framework puts the United Kingdom in an interesting position: as a CPTPP member, it would nominally be part of any such discussions. As a country outside the EU single market, it would not automatically benefit from EU-side arrangements. Whitehall will be watching Brussels and Ottawa closely.
For Lagos and Los Angeles, the significance is this: the global trading system that emerged from Bretton Woods and the GATT has always had Washington as its essential guarantor. What Carney is building — and what Brussels appears prepared to join — is an alternative architecture for the open global economy, one designed to function whether or not the United States chooses to participate. That is not a minor trade negotiation. That is a reordering of the world economy.
