Picture: National Review
Late last week, (January 19 to 23,) the most elite of the political and business elites gathered in Davos, Switzerland, for the annual jolly of the World Economic Forum. Apart from the usual waffle on themes like global cooperation, innovation, and sustainable growth, net zero, the oportuniies offered by AI and the quality of the obscenely expensive wines,foods and prostitutes on offer, there were a few shocks to the delicate systems of the gathered self - aggrandisers.
Shocks had been guaranteed from the moment US President Donald Trump announced he would attend.That alone was enough to trigger an outbreak of pearl clutching among the liberal chatterati.
The first and perhaps biggest shock came when Trump reiterated his claim that the USA had to take control of Greenland for the sake of western security.
It was not the first time Trump had said that the United States intends to take Greenland, one way or another. Before the Davos gang convened Washington had threatened to impose tariffs on European allies that resisted the move, and had threatened that the USA would pull out of NATO. Everybody knows that without American military strength the alliance is as significant as a gnat's fart in the hurricane force winds of Storm Donald so NATO’s obituary was proclaimed yet again. The United States, we are solemnly informed, can no longer be trusted as an ally and that it is even a predatory state. The West is finished.
Cue panic. Cue Davos. Cue the anguished cries of people who have not had to think seriously about the global power balance since the mid-1980s.
All of this reached something of crescendo last week when Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, speaking with unusual frankness, acknowledged that the so-called liberal rules-based order was over. “Let me be direct,” he stated. “We are in the midst of a rupture not a transition.”
Carney delivered a frank assessment of how he views the direction of the world economy when he said the longstanding U.S.-led, rules-based international order is over and middle powers like Canada must pivot to avoid falling prey to further "coercion" from powerful actors.
Carney said multilateralism and the "architecture of collective problem-solving" — relying on institutions like the World Trade Organization, the United Nations and Conference of the Parties (COP) for climate talks — has been "diminished" and countries have to accept they may have to go it alone more often than in the recent past.
"Many countries are drawing the same conclusions. They must develop greater strategic autonomy: in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains.
"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," Carney said which unintentionally confirms that the USA claim on Greenland, a frozen wilderness with no food prouction, no industry, no economy other than handouts from Denmark and a population of 67,000.
Something that is not often mentioned but might become significant as Trump, having opened negotiations on Greenland, turns his attention to Iran, what comes after it is the Soviet parallel at the heart of Mark Carney’s Davos speech: he wasn’t just critiquing Western alliance politics, he was drawing on a very specific late-communist logic to illuminate how contemporary international order operates.
In that speech Carney explicitly invoked former Czech President Václav Havel’s The Power of the Powerless and its greengrocer parable about how late Soviet communist regimes were sustained through ritual compliance with a known falsehood rather than genuine belief, and adapted it to describe the U.S.-led “rules-based international order” as a similar “pleasant fiction” that middle powers have long performed support for despite knowing its selective application and coercive elements to gain access to trade, finance, and security.
Carney quoted Havel’s idea of “living within the lie,” stressing that the system’s power derives from performative pretense and that its fragility is exposed when participants refuse the script. He used this to urge countries and firms to “take down their signs” — reject the illusion of mutual benefit in economic integration, acknowledge the order’s hollowness, and build genuine coordination and strategic autonomy amid great-power rivalry rather than bilateral accommodation with a declining hegemon.
But the real question is not whether Carney is right about the passing of the “rules based international order but why it has taken so long for people like him to notice. The answer lies in a comforting illusion: that American power had, post-1945, somehow transformed itself from self-interest into benign liberal principle.
As anyone who possesses a degree of familiarity with the history of American foreign policy will tell you, Trump's intention, (aka The Donroe Doctrine,) to disrupt the 'rules based order' so beloved by bueucrats like Carney and Keir Starmer is nothing new, the United States has always acted in its own interest. It has always treated international law as conditional. It has always exempted itself from rules it helped design when those rules became inconvenient. This is not a Trumpian innovation. It is how great powers behave. It is how the US has behaved for decades since the end of World War II, and how Britain behaved between the end of the Napoleonic Wars to the end of World War One, which left us seriously weakened and the USA grew economically and in military power. The American imperium has always been an axis of hypocrisy rather than an axis of democracy.
What has changed is not the way America exploits its power, but the moment at which the West's delusion of a liberal consensus has finally been forced into daylight.
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