The “rules-based international order” was always pish-posh that had very little to do with international law and boiled down to Washington making up the rules and giving the rest of us our orders. Which, it must be acknowledged, for the most part we cheerfully obeyed.
But I’ll tell ya, one thing that wasn’t on my bingo card for 2026, or any other year for that matter, was a Canadian prime minister getting up on his hind legs in public and bluntly stating the obvious.
So here’s to Mark Carney for having the intestinal fortitude to state the obvious so clearly – and at the annual World Economic Forum plutocrats’ beanfest in Davos, Switzerland, no less!
We always knew, Mr. Carney told his influential audience on Tuesday, that “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.”
It was a useful fiction, though, he pointed out without quite filling in the blanks, because it worked for us. Us, in this case, being The West, the principal beneficiaries of the post-World-War-II American Imperium.
But that was then and this is now, thanks to Donald Trump, who Mr. Carney prudently never mentioned by name. “This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
That was the brave part, which you, my patient readers, have no doubt been reading in a multitude of other places all day yesterday. For this reason, I won’t be quoting our prime minister at great length. Nevertheless, that short passage was obviously the reason Mr. Carney’s words flew around our interconnected world so swiftly and were greeted with such instant reverence.
After all, he has just said what everyone was thinking but was afraid to say!
In other words, Mr. Carney’s elementary deduction was a true emperor-has-no-clothes moment – although I apologize for using a metaphor that many of you will have trouble unseeing once you’ve thought about it for a moment.
Whether Mr. Carney’s Rupture Address goes down as one of the great orations of history, like the 272 words of the greatest American president’s Gettysburg Address, remains to be seen. It was a historic speech by any standard, though – even that of The New York Times, the Great Bothsideser of modern journalism. Mr. Carney is said to have written it himself.
Now, let us pause for an important word of caution. Just because Mr. Carney said “you cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination,” doesn’t mean he thinks we should throw the internationalist baby out with the imperialist bathwater.
“The middle powers must act together,” he said, “because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” (Emphasis added.) As for the lesser powers, though, presumably we’ll let the Devil take the hindmost.
Still, the PM made a good point about how to deal with a more powerful adversary, true even when it’s not a bully superpower run by a lunatic, a description that could probably be applied to more than one of the great powers at this unexpected moment in history.
Middle powers need to take some inspiration from the trade union movement, Mr. Carney said without quite saying it: “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,” he added, accurately. “It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.”
So this reminds me of the question posed by that old song, composed just after the turn of the last century, that many readers of this blog will have heard before, even if, like most of the leaders of the labour movement whose anthem it is supposed to be, we can’t quite remember the words. “What force on earth is weaker than the feeble strength of one?”
Mr. Carney went on: “In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice – compete with each other for favour, or to combine to create a third path with impact.”
Or, as the song quotes above more succinctly puts this point: “But the union makes us strong! Solidarity Forever!”
Rather than re-reading the rest of Mr. Carney’s Rupture Address, the limited meaning of which is clear enough, I would refer readers to the sound if no longer politically practical analysis of economic relationships in the famous song that seems unexpectedly to have inspired the prime minister.
Astonishingly, the gathered plutocrats gave him a standing ovation. That wasn’t on my bingo card either.