Davos, Carney and the staged revolt against American hegemony
Does Carney’s WEF speech herald a sincere embrace of multipolarity — and rejection of US hegemony — or a mere rebranding of empire?
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The annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos is not known as a hotbed of anti-imperialist resistance — let alone anti-US rhetoric. Yet that was unmistakably the tone of many speeches delivered this year.
“Until now, we tried to appease the new president in the White House”, Belgian prime minister Bart De Wever said, pointing to last year’s EU-US trade deal, widely criticised as tantamount to Brussels’s capitulation to Washington. “But now so many red lines are being crossed. Being a happy vassal is one thing. Being a miserable slave is something else”.
“This is not a time for new imperialism or new colonialism”, boldly proclaimed French president Emmanuel Macron.
Faced with Trump’s aggressive unilateralism, “it is time to seize this opportunity and build a new independent Europe”, said European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen.
These remarks were largely prompted by Trump’s repeated threats against Greenland — threats he partially walked back at Davos by citing an unspecified NATO framework agreement supposedly in the works.
Yet the most striking and widely discussed speech was delivered by Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney.
The end of a “pleasant fiction”
“Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality”, Carney declared, “where geopolitics among the great powers is not subject to any constraints”.
Every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great-power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can and the weak must suffer what they must. And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.
Most astonishingly, Carney openly declared the so-called “rules-based international order” dead — and indeed questioned whether it ever truly existed:
For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, praised its principles and benefited from its predictability. We could pursue value-based foreign policies under its protection. We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes. So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals. And largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct: we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
Here, Carney is not merely saying that the “rules-based order” is dead. He is conceding that the said order was always, at least in part, a fiction — one in which rules were applied selectively by the hegemon to advance its interests, while subordinate powers went along with the charade because they, and particularly their subimperial elites, benefited from it.
However, Carney argued that this bargain has collapsed now that the hegemon has turned its coercive tools against Western allies themselves, Greenland being the most obvious example, alongside Trump’s threats against Canada and his aggressive use of tariffs.
Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.
Strikingly, Carney implicitly compared the current decline of US hegemony to the final days of the Soviet Union, invoking Václav Havel’s parable of the shopkeeper who sustains an exhausted system by continuing to display a communist slogan no one believes in. Then, as now, Carney argued, it is time to “stop living within a lie”:
The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.
The sign in question he is referring to is, of course, the myth of a mutually beneficial US-led Western alliance.
“What does it mean for middle powers to live the truth?”, Carney asked.
First, it means naming reality. Stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is — a system of intensifying great-power rivalry, where the most powerful pursue their interests, using economic integration as coercion.
Carney’s conclusion is that middle-ranking Western powers must break ranks with the hegemon, coordinate among themselves and bolster their sovereignty — their capacity to withstand external pressure.
When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.
More broadly, Carney appeared to call for a new, more “honest” rules-based order grounded in what he termed “value-based realism”, citing Finnish prime minister Alexander Stubb:
Other countries, especially intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity.
This, he argued, requires being “principled and pragmatic” and embracing “variable geometry” — different coalitions for different issues — citing new strategic partnerships with Qatar and China. Notably, these remarks came just days after Carney’s high-profile visit to Beijing, the first by a Canadian leader since 2017, during which he described China as “more predictable” than the United States and spoke of a “new world order”.
This was echoed in his conclusions at Davos:
We understand that this rupture calls for more than adaptation. It calls for honesty about the world as it is. We are taking the sign out of the window. We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.
What should we make of Carney’s speech, which according to the New York Times was greeted with standing ovations and approving references from other Western leaders?
Many critics of US imperialism hailed it as historic. Geopolitical commentator Arnaud Bertrand wrote:
Make no mistake, Carney’s speech at Davos may prove to be one of the most important speeches made by any global leader over the past 30 years. This is the type of speech that will likely be remembered in history books centuries from now. I’m not exaggerating: it’s potentially this consequential.
Think about how extraordinary this is. One of America’s closest allies — a G7 country, a Five Eyes country, a NATO country, its next-door neighbour — directly and officially, on the global stage, compared American hegemony to the Soviet Union and explicitly called its end.
Such enthusiasm is understandable. A senior Western leader openly questioning American hegemony, exposing the “rules-based order” as a fiction and calling for coordinated resistance by middle powers — while being applauded by the Western establishment — is undeniably significant. Yet I believe a more sober and critical reading is required.
A rather selective criticism of the “rules-based order”
A first point to note is that, for all his calls for truth-telling, Carney’s speech was remarkably evasive. While he conceded that “international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim”, this formulation is an extreme euphemism.
A genuinely honest account would have named the reality behind this asymmetry: decades of violence inflicted on the Global South through exploitation, coercion, subversion, regime change and war — violence actively supported by US vassals, including Canada.
Canada played a significant role in the US-led war in Afghanistan from 2001 to 2014, deploying more than 40,000 Canadian Armed Forces personnel to the country. Although it did not officially participate in the 2003 US-led invasion of Iraq, Canada provided extensive material and logistical support to the operation — which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis — by maintaining naval vessels in the Persian Gulf and allowing Canadian military personnel to serve within coalition forces through exchange programmes.
Canada played a central role in the 2004 US-orchestrated overthrow of Haiti’s democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, a pivotal event that deepened foreign influence and contributed to Haiti’s ongoing instability. It also played an active role in NATO’s 2011 war on Libya, which destroyed the country’s central government and plunged it into lasting chaos and violence.
Furthermore, over the past two years, Canada has aided the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza by continuing to supply weapons to Israel. And more recently, it offered implicit support for the United States’ blatantly illegal attack on Venezuela and the kidnapping of President Nicolás Maduro.
One might therefore say that an honest appraisal of the US-led “rules-based order” would have to acknowledge not just its failures, but its truly criminal consequences — and Canada’s complicity in them. Yet Carney not only glossed over this, but indeed argued that this very order enabled Canada to “pursue value-based foreign policies”, the very policies he now claims Trump is obstructing and that Canada and other states must seek to pursue independently. In doing so, Carney appears to uphold the very fiction he claims to be demolishing.
The same applies to his claim that only now — under Trump — has the world entered a ruthless age of power politics in which “the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must”, or that only now has the United States begun using “economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion”. This “Year Zero” narrative is deeply disingenuous.
In fact, the weaponisation of economic relations and the brutal consequences of sanctions have been a reality for decades. In the 1990s, the United Nations imposed sweeping sanctions on Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait; these sanctions, backed and enforced by Western powers including Canada, were associated with severe deprivation, widespread malnutrition, shortages of medicine and clean water, and a dramatic collapse in living standards — so much so that estimates suggest hundreds of thousands of excess deaths, particularly among children.
Likewise, the United States’ unilateral sanctions against Venezuela have had profound human costs. Former UN Special Rapporteur Alfred de Zayas estimated that over 100,000 Venezuelans had died as a result of sanctions by early 2020, as shortages of food and medicine intensified under the pressure of economic blockade policies.
Canada has supported these sanction regimes politically and diplomatically, aligning with US policy on Venezuela and enforcing multilateral sanctions on Iraq. Notably, Mark Carney himself was governor of the Bank of England during the first Trump administration’s coup attempt against Venezuela in 2019, when he oversaw the illegal freezing — effectively the theft — of billions of dollars’ worth of gold belonging to the Venezuelan state.
To suggest that only recent US policy has turned economic instruments into weapons obscures the long history of Western coercive economic measures that have inflicted immense suffering on civilian populations, particularly in the Global South.
A rebranding of empire?
The same “Year Zero” narrative also underpins Carney’s comments on sovereignty. In his speech, he implies that integration with the United States has only now — under Trump — come to entail subordination for second-tier Western countries. In reality, this has always been the case. Since the end of the Second World War, Western states have been politically, economically and militarily subordinated to the United States.
It is often argued that these countries benefited from their subimperial role within the US-led system. But such benefits were never evenly distributed. Even within the West, alternative models of socioeconomic organisation — greater redistribution of wealth, resource nationalism or non-aligned foreign policies — were systematically foreclosed. This was achieved not only through economic pressure and political manipulation, but, at times, through covert and overt violence, including rogue operations carried out by Western military, intelligence and security services, typically under US direction, with the explicit aim of suppressing the left.
In this context, Western leaders aligned themselves with the US-managed order primarily in pursuit of their own class and personal interests, rather than those of their societies. Indeed, those who sought to deviate from Washington’s strategic dictates often faced severe political consequences, and in some cases violent ends. To suggest that Western subordination to the United States is a novelty introduced by Trump is therefore simply false.
