Editor’s Note: On January 20, on the global stage provided by the World Economic Forum at Davos, Switzerland, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered one of the most important and prescient speeches of the Trump era. At the risk of boring some readers, and hopefully inspiring many others, we present here a version deeply-edited to fit the available space. The complete text is available everywhere online.
By Mark Carney
There is a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where the large, main power is submitted to no limits, no constraints.
[And] the other countries, especially intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the various states.
The power of the less powerful starts with honesty.
Every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must. And this is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself. 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.
Well, it won’t. So, what are our options?
In 1978, the Czech dissident and later president, Václav Havel, wrote an essay called “The Power of the Powerless,” and in it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself? And his answer began with a greengrocer.
Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world unite.’ He doesn’t believe it, no one does, but he places a 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.
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 we knew that international law applied with varying rigor 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 we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
This bargain no longer works. 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 have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. Great powers have begun 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. And as a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions that they must develop greater strategic autonomy, in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains. A country that can’t feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself, has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.
But let’s be clear-eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable. Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty.
This is classic risk management, [which] comes at a price, but that cost of strategic autonomy, of sovereignty can also be shared. Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses. And the question for middle powers like Canada is not whether to adapt to the new reality – we must. The question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls, or whether we can do something more ambitious.
Canada was amongst the first to hear the wake-up call, leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture. Canadians know that our old comfortable assumptions – that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security – are no longer valid. And our new approach rests on what Alexander Stubb, the President of Finland, has termed “value-based realism”.
Or, to put it another way, we aim to be both principled and pragmatic – principled in our commitment to fundamental values – sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights. And pragmatic – recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values. And we are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength. We are building that strength at home.
Since my government took office, we are fast tracking a trillion dollars of investments in energy, AI, critical minerals, new trade corridors and beyond. We’re doubling our defense spending by the end of this decade. And we are rapidly diversifying abroad. We have agreed to a comprehensive strategic partnership with the EU. We have signed 12 other trade and security deals on four continents in six months. The past few days, we’ve concluded new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar. We’re negotiating free trade pacts with India, ASEAN, Thailand, Philippines and Mercosur.
We’re doing something else. To help solve global problems, we’re pursuing variable geometry, in other words, different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests. So, on Ukraine, we’re a core member of the Coalition of the Willing and one of the largest per capita contributors to its defense and security. On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark, and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland’s future.
Our commitment to NATO’s Article 5 is unwavering. We’re working with our NATO allies to further secure the alliance’s northern and western flanks, including through Canada’s unprecedented investments in over-the-horizon radar, in submarines, in aircraft and boots on the ground, boots on the ice.
Canada has what the world wants. We are an energy superpower. We hold vast reserves of critical minerals. We have the most educated population in the world. Canada is a pluralistic society that works. Our public square is loud, diverse and free. Canadians remain committed to sustainability. We are a stable and reliable partner in a world that is anything but.
Canada strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland and calls for focused talks to achieve our shared objectives of security and prosperity in the Arctic. We’re championing efforts to build a bridge between the Trans Pacific Partnership and the European Union, which would create a new trading bloc of 1.5 billion people.
This is building coalitions that work, creating a dense web of connections across trade, investment, culture, on which we can draw for future challenges and opportunities. The middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.
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