Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech to World Economic Forum

I might start with the easy stuff and work my way through, I'm recharged but not yet fully performance effective.

I remember very little of my Thucydides from decades ago; mostly that bad times are coming at the end of an Empire kinda vibe.

Thucydides is very popular with the Davos types (international elites in finance, security, politics, tech, etc). He was an Athenian general, who thought that the rise of Athens made war with Sparta inevitable. The Thucydides trap was huge ten years ago, and an international relations theorist called Graham Allison published a book on it, which was an airport best-seller. Basically, Allison listed all these times a rising power disrupted an established hegemon, and war happened.

My criticism of that, then and now, is that it was pretty selective (the guy was trying to justify a book title, after all) and didn't engage with all the times that the 'trap' didn't happen.

I think one important thing that Allison brought to the public conversation back then was something called the security dilemma, and we're certainly seeing that play out now. In a chaotic, disrupted world, countries tend to turn themselves into mini-fortresses if they can, and desperately seek security through increasing their military spending, enlarging their armed forces, and signing alliances. The dilemma comes in in that, even if they're doing this purely for the sake of defending themselves, it might appear to an outside actor like belligerance, and like they're preparing for a war. Because people tend to project their agenda onto others - even state actors - a belligerent nation like the United States interprets this as a 'fight' response as opposed to a 'flight' response, and gets even more belligerent, making the situation worse. That's an important part of Carney's speech.

What is the WEF really, and why is he addressing middle powers at an econ event?

The WEF, or 'Davos' (it's hosted there), used to be the event where the elite gathered every year and decided our fates behind closed doors. I'm being a little tongue-in-cheek, but only slightly. You didn't really need to have an Illuminati conspiracy theory when Davos was happening, almost in plain sight. This might be a poor analogy as I don't know if it's the biggest one, but you know how there are lots of comics and pop culture conventions around the world? Davos is like the Comic Con that's held in California once per year. The big one. The one where there is a high barrier to entry and everything costs most.

In short, it's not just aboute economics - business leaders go there to have private conversations and make deals with politicians. Security leaders go there to reaffirm support for each other or make new deals, like the break between turns in a game of Risk. And, especially over the past ten years, tech leaders go there to grease the wheels of what regulations may or may not be appropriate if you want big investment in your country.

When people picture 'the global elite', it's attendees at Davos. So Carney picking this venue over the UN General Assembly means he's deliberately targeting his message at his peers - world leaders, central bankers, the class that was either bred to rule or has come to power to the point that they're in the room. I think that's part of what makes this speech so impactful.

I'd say it's kinda impossible to disentangle economics and trade from politics when you ask how nation states are run, especially now. There's a whole field that studies the overlap of the two called Political Economy. But no, you're not being naive, it's just one of those things that is made almost intentionally obscure so, historically, people wouldn't pay attention.

How did alliances work before the idealism we have currently, or is there no parallels at all because the world was never this interconnected before?

'Nostalgia is not a strategy' is the crux of Carney's speech, and I think his plain stating of how the US-created 'international rules based order' no longer exists is the bluntest I've heard someone in a democratic government state things outside of a shielded bunker.

The nostalgia Carney (The Hon. Mr Carney? Prime Minister Carney?) is referring to is, since the US won the Cold War, the order established by America had a lot of bullshit and fiction in it, but it worked for the majority of countries who subscribed to US-led multilateralism. Carney really clearly highlights that the reason countries were willing to let the US be hypocrites on things like human rights and trade rules was because broadly, the US could guarantee security for vast swathes of the world, through its systems of alliances, its military deterrence, and by using its economic power as a stabilising force, not as a blunt instrument to hurt people with.

A point that has been made frequently is that the second invasion of Iraq under Bush/Obama and the US's military operations in Venezuela were essentially the same thing, the only difference is the US isn't pretending to care about checking with international institutions anymore, or giving things the gloss of 'we're spreading democracy and freedom'. But that's a pretty fucking huge difference. I'll quote directly from the part of the speech I think is most impactful:

For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that 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 we knew 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 we 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.

When he speaks of 'useful fictions' I'd say that's a pretty good description of the way alliances actually worked in the age of idealism, which I'd date from the end of the Cold War to 2016. Yes, the US were hypocrites about a lot of things. They'd cry foul about human rights abuses in China while having their own prison industrial complex. They'd denounce torture in other countries but did torture themselves. They'd say China was using coercive economic policy in the pacific, but the US became a superpower through the same means. They'd accuse their enemies of war crimes whilst documented war crimes committed by US forces in the Global War on Terror went either unpunished or punished by means other than international law. They even passed a law domestically under Bush that the US could invade the Hague if a US service person, intelligence officer, or politician was detained.

What Carney means by 'we're taking down our sign' is we're no longer pretending that US actions are exceptions to the norm. The bargain doesn't work anymore. It certainly came under immense strain during Iraq, but it resolved itself, because the international community (which usually means developed economies who participate in Post-WWII international institutions) got freedom of the seas, open and fair trade that could be resolved through dispute resolution at the WTO, and - generally, in what now seems like a historic aberration - peace and propsperity. As long as you put the sign in the window.

But the fact that the US isn't even pretending to care, and that their actions are no longer brief exceptions to international law but consistently breaking it whilst brutalising their own people, it's impossible to continue on with this fiction of the 'rules based international order'. If the world's biggest power doesn't abide by it and doesn't even pretend to care about it anymore, what's the point?

What Carney is saying here to other middle powers is really important. The term is contested, but for definitional clarity I'd say a middle power is an economically developed country, usually in Northeast Asia, Europe, South America or the Pacific, who has traditionally been under the United States's security umbrella. It's powers who have things like a potent standing defense force, but not the ability to unilaterally go anywhere in the world and do anything. They have economic might, but they can't just change the world trade system by itself. He's speaking directly to everyone who's recently been screwed over by the US treating their allies like shit, abandoning trade deals, pulling out of key global institutions and agreements. These are the things the developed world depended on to keep up with the fiction that maybe the US sometimes acted like a neoliberal monster, but by and large, the bargain is worth it.

He talkes about principles-based engagement, which I think is really smart. No, Canada and China are never gonna agree on issues of democracy or who owns what, but they can work together on climate change and trade. When he talks about groupings of middle powers, it's a smart way forward for countries that benefitted from having a rules-based global order to carry forward the parts that were good and worked. Examples are like-minded countries stepping up to help Ukraine and counter Russia, or signing new trade deals that are fair and without coercion between themselves, or grouping together to keep foreign aid and international development alive instead of just turning inward.

Whether that'll happen, I don't know, but the speech is so significant because it clearly states that Canada is no longer pretending that the US is a friend, that the US can be trusted, or that the US is bound by its own laws or the laws that international institutions try to uphold. Hopefully it gives courage to other leaders, especially of democracies, to stop appeasement and start building solutions together.

Given that a nation is likely to incur US ire at some point just for not giving up its resources, its sovereignty, or its arms, what's the point of pretending anymore? Hopefully the speech will go down in history as the moment where developed countries, and developing countries seeking to advance, saw that appeasement and giving in to coercion by the United States wasn't worth it, that the old bargain of a stable world guaranteed by America isn't coming back, and it's time for something new.

I'm not sure what the something new might be, but at least he's encouraging his peers to be brave and state things as they are, not as they used to be.

Edit: Thanks for all the kind words. These write ups are quite hard to put together for a variety of reasons, so I really appreciate the people that have written saying it helped them out.