After the American Order: Mark Carney’s Case for Middle Powers

At the annual summit of the World Economic Forum held this January, Prime Minister of Canada Mark Carney declared that “we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” There, thousands of global leaders convened with the spirit of addressing the geopolitical and economic fragmentation that has characterized the past few years. The summit, often referred to as “Davos,” after its host city in Switzerland, featured remarks from President Donald Trump along with representatives from other global superpowers, including China’s Vice Premier, He Lifeng, and President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen. However, it was Carney whose address sparked an international debate that we should pay close attention to. 

Mark Carney’s Bold Move at Davos

Carney, whose approval ratings and global fame have soared after his candid remarks, provocatively declared that the rules-based international order “is not coming back.” He also offered a legitimate path forward for middle powers like Canada: accelerate efforts to become independent from U.S. hegemony, form a network of likeminded intermediary nations, and uphold liberal values internationally when possible.

Carney’s proposal hinges on the idea that the U.S. is no longer a reliable leader of the interconnected global political and economic system. Instead, he argued that the U.S. has been wreaking havoc through “weaponized interdependence,” a term popularized by Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman in 2019. Within the globalized economic system it has constructed, the U.S. is weaponizing the switchboard by leveraging tariffs over interconnected supply chains and manipulating the international banking infrastructure. For instance, President Trump has frozen the bank accounts and limited internet access for authorities in the International Criminal Court for trying to bring Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin Netanyahu to trial. Weaponized interdependence is not original to the Trump regime; the U.S. has pulled the strings of the global institutions it leads before, but never to this extent. As Matias Spektor wrote in Foreign Affairs, the divergence from previous policy lies in the lack of a moral justification for our actions, however flimsy, and the indiscriminate use of these tools. 

The Good, the Bad 

Carney’s address has elicited a wide array of reactions from government officials and scholars alike. Trump, who immediately criticized Carney for his speech, later claimed that the Prime Minister had rescinded his remarks in a private phone call. Carney denied ever apologizing to Trump. Other world leaders at Davos gave Carney a rare standing ovation following his speech. The opposing reactions demonstrate a key point: Carney’s speech threatened both the American global posture and the framework of the liberal order. 

While Carney certainly went head-to-head with Trump over America’s strongman approach to foreign policy, his most daring move was to proclaim that “we knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false” and “that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient.” In his speech, Carney declared that the lie of mutual benefit, in the age of weaponized interdependence, is no longer a useful fiction.

Carney’s willingness to point out that falsity, however, has wide implications for international checks on American power. Spektor argued that American hypocrisy, while imperfect, had a democratizing function in the international system. Weaker countries could appeal to liberal ideals when the U.S. was pushing the envelope, and America would have to scale back to realign rhetoric with reality. Spektor points out that during the so-called “War on Terror,” international outcry at the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq forced the U.S. on the back foot.

While it is true that the U.S. has had to reconcile its projected image with its actions on multiple occasions, what Spektor’s contention misses is the proclivity of superpowers to rhetorically shift or redefine the liberal standards when called out. When the nuclear justifications for the “War on Terror” were debunked, the Bush administration shifted its rhetoric towards women’s rights in the region. The continued military presence in Iraq became not an unjustified breach of sovereignty, but a righteous mission to save Iraqi and Afghan women from their “barbaric” oppressors. With that being said, there have been cases where rhetorical shifts were insufficient, and the U.S. implemented material change in response to accusations of hypocrisy.  For example, the propaganda component of the U.S.-Soviet ideological competition afforded weaker powers and domestic Americans greater leverage to demand reform from the U.S. federal government. Historians recognize that Cold War Soviet propaganda, which pointed out the contradiction between Jim Crow segregation and the professed ideals of America, added significant pressure on the U.S. to pass the Civil Rights Act following international outcries of hypocrisy.

In the new system, without the need to connect actions to values, Spektor argues that “bargaining replaces persuasion, and compliance depends less on consent than on coercion.” Beyond the moral issues with a “might-makes-right” paradigm, he suggests that conflict will be more likely to escalate and collaboration could deteriorate more easily. 

This is not necessarily true across the board. A glance back at U.S.-Russian detente policy in the Cold War offers a model of how a more solid foundation for collaboration was established by putting aside ideology and values-based international engagement. During the 1970s, a shared desire to avert nuclear miscalculation created avenues for cooperation over unprecedented arms treaties and nonproliferation agreements, and took proxy conflicts from a boil to a simmer for a time. 

In the last 10 years, the U.S. has framed competition with China partly as an ideological battle between democracy and autocracy, and partly as techno-economic competition. Trump’s more pragmatic approach, that centrally sees the relationship with China as an avenue for economic gain or loss, could reduce the risk of military conflict and escalation through economic dealmaking. The downside of such a paradigm is the likelihood that it would lead the U.S. to abandon Taiwan, which we claim to protect as both a fellow democracy opposing the People’s Republic of China and as a center of the semiconductor industry. This framework also legitimizes many of China’s actions, both domestically and internationally, as long as they benefit us economically. China’s international economic strategy has already been characterized by intellectual property theft, state-subsidized operations, and economic coercion of smaller economies. A mass exodus of faith in international economic institutions would grant China free rein and even encourage these practices.

Diverging from Spektor, other commentators have emphasized the constructive potential of Carney’s exhortation. Ezra Klein, a political commentator and columnist at the New York Times, offered a more optimistic, but still mixed, view of Carney’s statement and its implications. He suggests that the Prime Minister’s opportunistic actions preceding Davos — negotiating lower Canadian tariffs on China and courting Qatar — back up the implicit threats of his speech. Carney is sending a message to the U.S., according to Klein, that middle countries can turn to China should Trump continue to aggravate its historical allies. They must still contend with an obvious danger in trying to find a balance between the two superpowers. 

The Unexplored

What seems most intriguing, beyond declaring the old order decrepit, was Carney’s suggestion that “middle powers,” which characteristically have a similar degree of economic and military influence as Canada, should band together. Criticism of this proposed coalition-building has been harsh. While some have lauded the vision, many have pointed out that an issue-by-issue bloc of middle powers would be insufficient in the face of Chinese export power and U.S. dollar hegemony on either side.  

The real question is, what other options do the “middle powers” have? A recollection of attempts at appeasing Trump with greater Greenland access or appealing to a war-hungry Vladimir Putin demonstrates that compliance will not bear fruit. The problem was not that Carney suggested a middle power coalition, but that he failed to address the real possibility of fragmentation among these powers. However, much credit is due. His speech was clearly a first step, not an alliance charter.

A bloc of intermediate states is, in fact, the best way to secure autonomy amid lawless U.S. action and China’s aggressive economic statecraft. At first glance, Carney’s approach seems to call to mind a fragile web of alliances with no real guarantees to uphold liberal norms or offer collective support. Absent clear multilateral agreements, individual alliances between these nations will have too little weight in the face of economic carrots or sticks from either the U.S. or China. Existing networks might also be insufficient. The E.U. remains too reluctant to use the powerful economic weapons at its disposal, which means European nations ready to resist will have to establish another forum for collective action or work bilaterally. The key issue remains that these superpowers would be less likely to take seriously a coalition of middle powers without a posture of legitimate collective action.

Critics rightly point out two key dynamics that will hinder middle powers’ coalitional efforts. First, nations have a tendency to put their direct interests first if a mutual goal is ill-defined. Second, a loosely-bound coalition creates a prisoner’s dilemma where the hegemon will pursue a divide-and-conquer approach, using individual incentives to force defection.

Carney’s first step, coupled with a coalition aimed at the well-defined objective of resisting U.S. economic coercion, could be enough to overcome these obstacles. The middle powers, beyond pursuing strategic autonomy individually, should create a bloc with a clear objective of combatting U.S. economic pressure on any one of them. A coalition based on resisting the means of power, rather than opposing an actor or a specific policy, would allow them to put substantive policy disagreements aside.

The Prime Minister put Canada, and himself, on the line in his address. His behavior already broke the logic of the prisoner's dilemma; he preemptively demonstrated his willingness to collaborate with middle powers in the face of the pressure to align with Trump. If the middle powers are brave enough to follow suit, an emerging coalition could be the best strategy in the face of a ruptured world order.