Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney arrived in Davos, Switzerland, with momentum. His speech at the World Economic Forum on Tuesday drew rave reviews because it said plainly what many leaders have avoided: The world has not eased into a new phase. It has ruptured. Constraints are weakening. Coercion is normalizing. The old language is starting to sound like theater.
The timing mattered, too. Carney did not come to Davos only from Ottawa. He came via Beijing, where Canada had just concluded a new “strategic partnership” with China. That diplomatic prelude gave his Davos message a different weight. Canada was not merely describing a harsher world. It was adjusting to one.
Carney called the rules-based international order a “pleasant fiction,” warned that major powers were increasingly acting as if they faced “no constraints,” and rejected the hope that compliance would buy safety. His message was blunt—and persuasive.
Yet there is a problem at the heart of his speech. It is not that Carney is wrong. It is that he is late—and lateness shapes credibility.
Carney framed his appeal around “middle powers,” countries that cannot dictate global outcomes but can pool leverage and build coalitions. It is an attractive image but an increasingly imprecise category. In a world structured by China-U.S. rivalry, “middle power” risks becoming shorthand for almost everyone outside the two poles: states that are not writing the rules yet can be made to live with outcomes they did not choose.
The more useful question is not whether a country is “middle” but how much agency it retains—how much latitude it has to hinge between the rival poles, diversify, and still act in its own interest without being disciplined by dependency. This was what Carney’s speech was really about. Canada is not discovering powerlessness; it is discovering constraint.
Days earlier in Singapore, Defense Minister Chan Chun Sing offered a parallel diagnosis at the Shangri-La Dialogue meeting of defense officials: The rules-based order is fading, enforcement is weakening, and smaller states are right to worry about a world where “might is right.” Yet his framing carried a different undertone. For Singapore, this is not a shocking rupture from a comfortable past. It is the underlying condition of international life, managed through capability, relevance, and coalition-building. Both Chan and Carney reached for the same now common aphorism—if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu—but in Singapore’s case, it lands less as theater than as doctrine.
Carney’s most persuasive passages describe how interdependence has flipped its polarity. Tariffs are no longer only trade tools. They have become instruments of pressure. Financial infrastructure carries strategic intent. Supply chains can be turned into vulnerabilities. Integration can become, as he put it, “the source of your subordination.” Access itself becomes leverage: access to markets, payment systems, key technologies, critical inputs. Exposure is uneven. Connectedness does not distribute risk fairly. Resilience is now prized alongside efficiency.
Carney also rejected the fatalism often associated with Thucydides: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” The temptation, he argued, is to accommodate—to soften positions, comply, and hope to stay safe. It won’t work.
His sharpest turn came from Vaclav Havel’s 1978 essay “The Power of the Powerless.” A greengrocer places a political slogan in his shop window not because he believes it but because he wants to avoid trouble. Everyone understands the slogan is hollow. Yet the system persists because everyone participates in the ritual. Havel called this “living within a lie.”
Carney applied the metaphor to the international order. For decades, he said, countries such as Canada joined the institutions, praised the principles, and benefited from stability. But they also understood that the story was “partially false.” Trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. International law was applied with varying rigor depending on who was accused and who was harmed. Still, Canada kept the sign in the window.
This is where the speech becomes quietly incriminating. Carney’s honesty is refreshing, but it also exposes complicity. The order endured not only because great powers dominated but because partners accepted the gap between rhetoric and reality as the price of predictability. The lie persisted because it was useful, expedient, and profitable.
Carney described this as a bargain that no longer works. True. But it raises the question that he did not confront directly: If Canada knew, why did it avoid calling out double standards when the costs were borne by weaker states?
For years, Western policymakers referred not simply to a rules-based order but to a “liberal international rules-based order,” as if the adjective settled the moral question. Yet much of the system was not liberal in practice. It often looked like hierarchy with procedural language: rules that constrained some more than others, norms invoked loudly when convenient and softened when inconvenient, sovereignty celebrated rhetorically while treated as conditional in practice.
Carney was right that U.S. hegemony delivered public goods. But hegemony also delivered exemptions. For much of the global south, the defining feature of the order was never that rules restrained the strong. It was that rules were frequently applied through power. This is why today’s Western anxiety does not automatically translate into moral authority. It seems more like well-deserved comeuppance. When Canada speaks of rupture, others hear continuity.
Carney’s pre-Davos China visit underscored what has changed. It is not only that the United States has become more openly transactional. It is also that China has become powerful enough to set terms in domains where it once had to accept them. Major powers increasingly treat rules as instruments—including Washington and Beijing.
Canada is therefore not navigating a world with one hegemon and a stable institutional canopy. It is navigating a competitive environment between two system-shaping powers, each with its own tools of leverage and each willing to use dependence when it serves strategic aims. Carney’s pledge to avoid being forced to choose between “hegemons and hyper-scalers” is apt. It is also revealing. The new era is not only about alliances. It is about the infrastructure of modern life: data, compute, capital, standards, networks.
Seen this way, the question is not whether globalization “failed.” The question is how globalization produced forms of dependence that can now be converted into coercion.
Globalization is not a policy. It is a process bound up with modernization itself: the accelerating interconnection of people, capital, goods, technology, and information. What failed was not interconnection but the governance of interconnection. Integration was supposed to encourage upgrading and positive-sum competition. Instead, globalization hardened into competitive advantage, rewarded arbitrage, privileged efficiency over resilience, and treated losers as background noise until their griping and laments became too loud to ignore.
Carney’s most compelling claim is that the power of the less powerful starts with honesty: Stop invoking the rules-based order as though it still functions as advertised, apply standards consistently, and build coalitions that reduce coercive leverage and create resilience. That is exactly right. But it is incomplete.
Honesty also demands memory. If Canada wants to help build a more just order, it cannot begin only at the moment when Canada itself feels newly exposed. It has to be willing to confront older hypocrisies, too—especially when the victims were smaller, poorer, and easier to overlook. It also means admitting that Canada itself has not always practiced the universalism it now calls for.
In the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada drew vaccine doses through the Covax facility, set up to increase access especially among poorer nations, despite having already secured extensive bilateral supply—a choice defended domestically as prudent but received abroad as scarcity politics cloaked in solidarity language. Canada has also faced long-running criticism for continuing major arms exports to Saudi Arabia even as the war in Yemen produced humanitarian catastrophe and persistent concerns about civilian harm. Neither case makes Canada uniquely culpable. But both underscore the point: Credibility is lost when universal principles sound conditional and recovered only when standards are applied even when the costs are real.
Taking the sign down is only the beginning. The harder task is proving that honesty will outlast convenience: defending rules when allies violate them and insisting on standards even when enforcement carries a price. Otherwise, Canada’s new realism risks becoming another form of theater—more austere than before but no less selective.