Mr. Carney’s Narrow Path
Mark Carney’s Davos speech drew a standing ovation from an audience of heads of state, business leaders, and global elites. It was an ambitious speech: carefully constructed, intellectually confident, and rhetorically effective. But it was also revealing of the tensions and contradictions embedded in Mr. Carney’s own worldview.
From the outset, he framed his argument around a blunt premise: that responsible leaders must see the world as it is, not as they would like it to be. And yet, it is precisely here that the tension begins. Because seeing the world clearly does not inevitably lead to a single conclusion or a unitary vision.
Mark Carney’s speech laid out a stark vision of the post-war world order: The rules-based international order is fraying; rivalry among great powers is intensifying; multilateral institutions on which middle powers have long relied are weakening. Drawing on Václav Havel’s sign in the window metaphor, he condemned the rituals and false assurances of a system that many states continue to praise publicly while privately acknowledging that it no longer functions as advertised.
The diagnosis itself is neither false nor naïve. Few serious observers would argue today that the postwar international order was a model of enlightened governance or moral consistency. It was unequal, often hypocritical, and applied unevenly. But it did possess a critical virtue: it maintained a strategic balance.
For the West, this imperfect order long served as a practical framework for defending values deemed fundamental — the primacy of law, restraint in the use of force, predictability in trade, and the legitimacy of common institutions. These values were not always respected but violating them carried costs.
It is precisely this system of constraints and counterweights that Donald Trump is helping dismantle. Not by exposing the system’s hypocrisy but by openly rejecting its limits, norms, and guardrails. By replacing the language of rules with the language of raw power, he is shattering a tacit pact that, for all its flaws, has continued to govern international behaviour for the last 80 years.
This is where Mr. Carney’s analysis becomes more problematic.
By dismissing the rules-based order as a “fiction” and urging states to stop “living a lie,” he risks conflating a legitimate critique of state hypocrisy with the abandonment of the fragile equilibrium that hypocrisy itself helped sustain. Under the banner of realism, he calls for a rapid reconfiguration of alliances, an enhanced reliance on bilateral and plurilateral deals, a sharp expansion of military capacity and an assertive pursuit of strategic autonomy.
Each of these moves can be defended on its own. Taken together, however, they point toward a more openly transactional world — precisely the outcome Mr. Carney claims to want to avoid.
The contrast with several European leaders is instructive. The pragmatism of Emmanuel Macron or Friedrich Merz is shaped by a far more immediate reality: Russian nuclear missiles aimed at their capitals and a hot war being fought on their doorstep. They, too, see the world as it is — not as they would like it to be. But confronted with direct existential risks, they draw a different conclusion: not to discard the rules-based order, but to reinforce it and adapt it to the new circumstances precisely because its erosion carries costs they cannot afford to ignore.
Mr. Carney’s realism is also shaped by Canada’s own historical experience — that of a country that has not seen a foreign war fought on its territory for more than two centuries. That distance confers analytical freedom, but it also creates a blind spot. What may appear from Ottawa as clear-eyed realism can look elsewhere like an unacceptable strategic gamble.
This is the narrow path Mr. Carney must now navigate.
In rejecting nostalgia and preaching realism, he must take care not to become Donald Trump’s unwitting partner in dismantling the postwar international order, contributing through technocratic adaptation to what Trump pursues through disruption and contempt.
Threading this needle will require prudence and the recognition that certain fictions, however imperfect, have at times prevented far more brutal realities from taking hold.