Overnight in Davos, Switzerland, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered what I suspect will be recorded in future history text books as an era defining speech. It is profound, accurate, and very relevant to another "Middle Power" like Australia.
Here is the full text of that speech. I urge you to read it in its entirety:
"It’s a pleasure – and a duty – to be with you at this turning point for Canada and for the world.
Today, I’ll talk about the rupture in the world order, the end of a nice story, and the beginning of a brutal reality where geopolitics among the great powers is not subject to any constraints.
But I also submit to you that other countries, particularly middle powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that embodies our values, like respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of states.
The power of the less powerful begins with honesty.
Every day we are reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry. That the rules-based order is fading. That the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.
This aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable – the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself. And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along. To accommodate. To avoid trouble. To hope that compliance will buy safety.
It won’t.
So, what are our options?
In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless. In it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?
His answer began with a greengrocer. Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world, unite!” He does not believe it. No one believes it. But he places the sign anyway – to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists.
Not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.
Havel called this “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.
It is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.
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 values-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.
Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics laid bare the risks of extreme global integration.
More recently, great powers began 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.
The multilateral institutions on which middle powers relied— the WTO, the UN, the COP – the architecture of collective problem solving – are greatly diminished.
As a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions. They must develop greater strategic autonomy: in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance, and supply chains.
This impulse is understandable. A country that cannot feed itself, fuel itself, or defend itself has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.
But let us be clear-eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable.
And there is another truth: if great powers abandon even the pretence of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from “transactionalism” become harder to replicate. Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships.
Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty. Buy insurance. Increase options. This rebuilds sovereignty – sovereignty that was once grounded in rules, but will be increasingly anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.
