Canadian Leader Carney’s Davos Speech Is Both Admirable and Hypocritical

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney arrived in Davos, Switzerland, with great momentum. His speech at the World Economic Forum on Tuesday sparked enthusiastic reactions because he said clearly what many leaders have avoided: that the world has not entered a new phase. It was torn. Restrictions are weakening. Coercion is normalization. The ancient language began to sound like theater.

Timing is also important. Carney didn’t just come to Davos from Ottawa. It came via Beijing, where Canada has just concluded a new “strategic partnership” with China. This diplomatic introduction gave his message in Davos a different weight. Canada was not just describing a harsher world. It was an adjustment to one.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney arrived in Davos, Switzerland, with great momentum. His speech at the World Economic Forum on Tuesday sparked enthusiastic reactions because he said clearly what many leaders have avoided: that the world has not entered a new phase. It was torn. Restrictions are weakening. Coercion is normalization. The ancient language began to sound like theater.

Timing is also important. Carney didn’t just come to Davos from Ottawa. It came via Beijing, where Canada has just concluded a new “strategic partnership” with China. This diplomatic introduction gave his message in Davos a different weight. Canada was not just describing a harsher world. It was an adjustment to one.

Carney described the rules-based international order as a “pleasant fantasy,” warned that major powers were increasingly behaving as if they faced “no constraints,” and rejected the hope that compliance would buy safety. His message was frank and convincing.

However, there is a problem at the heart of his speech. It’s not that Carney is wrong. Rather, it is late, and delay constitutes credibility.

Carney has focused his appeal on “middle powers,” countries that cannot dictate global outcomes but can accumulate influence and build alliances. It’s an attractive image but an increasingly imprecise category. In a world governed by competition between China and the United States, “middle power” risks becoming shorthand for almost everyone outside the poles: countries that have not yet written the rules could be forced to live with outcomes they did not choose.

The more useful question is not whether a state is “average” but how much power it retains—how much freedom it has to pause between the competing poles, to diversify, and to continue to act in its own interest without being disciplined by consequence. This was what Carney’s speech was really about. Canada does not discover a deficit. He discovers the limitation.

Days earlier in Singapore, Defense Minister Chan Chun Sing offered a parallel diagnosis at a Shangri-La Dialogue meeting among defense officials: the rules-based order is fading, enforcement of rules is weakening, and smaller countries are right to worry about a world where “might is right.” However, his framing had a different undertone. For Singapore, this does not represent a shocking break with a comfortable past. It is the basic condition of international life, managed through capacity, relevance, and alliance building. Both Chan and Carney have come up with the same now-common adage – if you’re not at the table, you’re on the menu – but in Singapore’s case, it’s less theater than doctrine.

Carney’s most compelling passages describe how codependency reversed its polarity. Tariffs are no longer just trade tools. They have become tools for pressure. Financial infrastructure carries strategic intentions. Supply chains can become vulnerabilities. Integration can become, as he puts it, “the source of your dependency.” Access itself becomes leverage: access to markets, payment systems, key technologies, and critical inputs. Exposure is uneven. Interdependence does not distribute risks fairly. Flexibility is now valued alongside efficiency.

Carney also rejected the fatalism often associated with Thucydides: “The strong do what they can, and the weak suffer as much as they must.” The temptation, he said, is to adapt – to soften attitudes, comply, and hope to stay safe. It won’t work.

His sharp turn came from Vaclav Havel’s 1978 essay, “The Power of the Powerless.” A greengrocer puts a political slogan on his shop window, not because he believes it, but because he wants to avoid trouble. Everyone understands that the slogan is hollow. However, the system continues because everyone participates in the ritual. Havel called this “living under a lie.”

Carney applied this analogy to the international system. Over the decades, countries like Canada have joined the institutions, applauded the principles, and benefited from stability, he said. But they also understood that the story was “partly false.” Trade rules were applied asymmetrically. International law has been applied with varying degrees of stringency depending on the accused and the aggrieved party. However, Canada kept the sign in the window.

This is where the rhetoric becomes quietly condemning. Carney’s honesty is refreshing, but it also reveals complicity. The system persisted not only because the great powers dominated, but because the partners accepted the gap between rhetoric and reality as the price of predictability. The lie continued because it was useful, beneficial and profitable.

Carney described this as a deal that no longer works. TRUE. But it raises a question it doesn’t confront directly: If Canada knew, why did it avoid calling for double standards when weaker countries bear the costs?

For many years, Western policymakers have referred not simply to a rules-based order, but to a “rules-based liberal international order,” as if that adjective settled the moral question. However, much of the regime was not liberal in practice. It often seemed like a hierarchy with procedural language: rules that constrained some more than others, norms that were loudly invoked when convenient and relaxed when uncomfortable, and sovereignty celebrated rhetorically while treated as conditional in practice.

Carney was right when he said that American hegemony provides public goods. But hegemony also provided exceptions. For much of the Global South, the defining characteristic of the system has never been that rules constrain the powerful. Rules have often been enforced through authority. For this reason, Western concern today does not automatically translate into moral authority. It sounds like deserved retribution. When Canada talks about rupture, others hear continuity.

Carney’s visit to China before Davos highlighted what has changed. Not only has the United States become more frank in making deals. It is also because China has become strong enough to set conditions in areas that it once had to accept. Major powers increasingly treat the rules as tools, including Washington and Beijing.

Thus, Canada is not navigating a world with a single hegemony and a stable institutional umbrella. It navigates a competitive environment between two forces shaping the system, each with its own levers of influence and each willing to use reliance when it serves strategic goals. Carney’s pledge to avoid having to choose between “hegemons and hardliners” was spot on. It is also revealing. The new era is not just about alliances. It’s about the infrastructure of modern life: data, computing, capital, standards, and networks.

From this perspective, the question is not whether globalization has “failed.” The question here is how globalization has produced forms of dependency that can now be transformed into coercion.

Globalization is not politics. It is a process linked to modernization itself: the accelerating interconnection of people, capital, goods, technology, and information. What failed was not interconnection, but interconnection management. Integration was supposed to encourage upward mobility and positive-sum competition. Instead, globalization turned into a competitive advantage, rewarding arbitrage, favoring efficiency over flexibility, and treating losers as background noise until their whining became too loud to be ignored.

Carney’s most compelling claim is that the power of the less powerful begins with honesty: stopping invoking the rules-based order as if it still works as advertised, enforcing standards consistently, and building coalitions that reduce coercive influence and create resilience. This is absolutely true. But it is incomplete.

Honesty also requires memory. If Canada wants to help build a fairer system, it can only begin at the moment when Canada itself feels newly exposed. It must be willing to confront older hypocrisy as well – especially when the victims are smaller, poorer, and easier to overlook. It also means acknowledging that Canada itself has not always practiced the inclusivity it now advocates.

In the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, Canada withdrew vaccine doses through the COVAX facility, which was set up to increase access especially among poorer countries, even though it already had extensive bilateral supplies — a choice defended domestically as prudent but accepted abroad as a policy of scarcity disguised in the language of solidarity. Canada has also faced long-standing criticism for its continued large arms exports to Saudi Arabia even as the war in Yemen has produced a humanitarian catastrophe and persistent concerns about harm to civilians. Neither case makes Canada uniquely culpable. But both highlight the point that credibility is lost when universal principles seem conditional, and can only be regained when standards are applied even when the costs are real.

Taking the banner down is just the beginning. The harder task is to prove that honesty will outlast comfort: defending rules when allies violate them and insisting on standards even when enforcement comes at a cost. Otherwise, Canadian neorealism risks turning into another form of theater – more austere than before but no less eclectic.