Carney Come Lately

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. 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. 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...

Carney Come Lately

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