And this is an urgent task now, because the world is changing rapidly. Ireland and Canada are navigating a global rupture, not a quiet transition. The post-Cold War world of rules-based order is breaking down. Multilateral institutions have weakened. Economic integration, from which we have benefited, is being weaponized. The international trading system, which we've relied upon for decades, is under threat. And at the same time, new technologies, from artificial intelligence to cyber and quantum, are changing the nature of war, the structure of economies, and the possibilities of human advancement. Climate change is no longer a warning, it's here. Last month, as you know and you felt, Ireland experienced its hottest May on record. In Canada last year, forests larger than Ireland burned in the drought and heat. Global conflicts are expanding and evolving. They're more than kinetic, as horrible as that is. They're economic, they're social, they're technological.
Canada, Ireland, and Europe are increasingly and more immediately vulnerable to once-distant threats. And I suggest that amidst this change, amidst this disruption, Canada, Ireland, and Europe can be pivotal, powerful, and purposeful — a force for good. Pivotal because we are the most connected region in the world, to each other and to others.
Canada has 16 free trade agreements with 51 countries, covering 1.5 billion people, two-thirds of global GDP. And we're on course to double that market access this year. The EU maintains preferential access to over 80 partner countries, making it the top trading partner for 80 nations globally.
Together we are powerful because we have the capacity to act together. Combined, the population is more than twice that of the United States. We have a larger cultural export industry and a more diverse one, I might add. A similarly sized GDP, comparable R&D spend. Our collective defense budget is twice that of China's. We're home to the majority of the world's top 100 universities and over half of the world's Nobel Prize winners. So together, we are one of the largest economic, cultural, technological, financial blocks in the world.
But to what purpose? Well, we are and can be a force for good because we safeguard the values of human rights, of dignity, and pluralism that our people hold dear. As with Burke's maxim, Canada and Ireland recognize our debt to those who built what we've inherited and our duty to those who will come after.
So I'm going to make an analogy. Just as Irish monks centuries ago preserved, copied, and taught classical knowledge amid the Dark Ages, we must preserve and defend our values, our traditions, our interests, during this rupture.
For this to happen, we need to act. We need to build again as we did before. Back in the 19th century, 1866, engineers laid the first telegraph cable along the floor of the Atlantic from Valencia Island off the coast of Kerry to Heart's Content in Newfoundland. It was considered wildly ambitious. It was hugely expensive at the time. And all previous attempts had failed. But it pushed the boundaries of what was possible. It was a cable that made the modern world possible — a world where messages and ideas that once took weeks to travel by ship then could travel within minutes.
We're now in a position where the 6 million printed volumes in Trinity College Library, the accumulated knowledge of centuries, in the time it takes me to finish this sentence, the entire contents of this library will have passed back and forth across the ocean more than 40 times. This is what becomes possible when we choose to build together with ambition.
Now, to make all of this practical, let me highlight three principles to help us build the key elements of that new order that preserves and lives our values. And the first is to recognize that as the requirements for sovereignty evolve, so must we. Right now, many countries, ourselves included, are concluding that they must develop greater strategic autonomy. And the impulse for that is understandable, because when the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself. And a country that cannot feed itself, fuel itself, or defend itself has few options.
But in the 21st century, the economic security and prosperity of our countries extends far beyond food, conventional energy, and security, as important and as fundamental as these are. Today, sovereignty requires reliable access to semiconductors, to space-based communications. It requires unhindered access to artificial intelligence, the latest models for protection as well as knowledge creation, critical minerals, payment systems, clean energy technologies, vaccines.
Now, because over decades governments and businesses prioritized efficiency over resilience, we all have developed supply chains and trading relationships that create dependencies that can turn economic integration from an advantage, which is what it was, into subordination. And so, Canada's strategic imperative is to build sovereign capabilities and resiliencies in these key areas.
That starts at home. We're fast-tracking a trillion dollars of investment in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors. We're investing to double our clean electricity grid. We're investing in quantum. We're building our food security.
But we recognize a second principle: that building true sovereignty cannot be achieved in isolation. It requires diversification. It requires partnership. And so, we are focused on building a dense web of connections. Said another way, ad hoc coalitions that work issue by issue with partners that share enough common ground to act together. And that's why Canada was the first non-European country to join the EU's safe defense procurement program. It's why we've signed 20 new economic and security agreements over five continents in the past year. It's why we're championing efforts to build a bridge between the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the European Union, something that would create a trading block of 1.5 billion.
