Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech was not a rejection of the rules, norms or multilateralism. Rather it was a bid to apprehend it from those who sought to cripple what has worked. His vision was unembellished, directing his middle-power peers in the room to act on the moment of “rupture”.
Carney’s premise was that the rules-based liberal order and its multilateral institutions risk becoming dysfunctional. Larger powers have allowed the World Trade Organisation to weaken and the UN Security Council to reach veto deadlocks, frustrating expectations of consistent enforcement and predictability.
His appeal to his middle power peers was to work alongside these institutions to sustain their shared future through “variable geometry”. It implies that different countries could go further on some issues than others based on negotiated interests. Without the institutional capacity or political will to uphold values consistently, value alignment now becomes conditional and ultimately a tool for engagement.
This is a significant departure for those in a world that found prosperity in the universal ideals permitted by the liberal rules-based order. Values risk becoming performative markers of alignment rather than enforceable commitments.
In such a world, climate change may be tolerated as a strategic inconvenience, much like certain human rights violations when enforcement depends more on coalition politics than universal norms. At best, middle powers may be unprepared or are unwilling to enter this world. The worst outcome would be if they chose that world.
Carney’s message should resonate.
Carney’s vision will not materialise for middle powers like Australia simply through participation in global forums, but through their ability to carry their regions with them.
Australia’s middle power politics is constrained more so than most of its peers. This is evident in Australia’s paradox in the Pacific: it is structurally indispensable to regional stability yet normatively constrained by its domestic politics and alliance dependencies. Australia is the region’s principal development financier, committing more than $4 billion to the Pacific in recent years. Yet Australia has been unable to solidify a widely accepted and consistent approach to climate change at home, giving credence to America’s climate denialist leadership. This leaves Australia the awkward task to navigate middle power politics as well as its regional optics.
These are internal contradictions that Pacific Island regional politics are comfortable with. But for Canberra, with a prevailing worldview still anchored in alliance commitments underwritten by American hegemony, this ultimately illustrates the limits of its middle-power position in a pluralistic order that Carney accepts here.
Long accustomed to straddling alliance loyalty and regional pragmatism, Canberra will find this space narrowing and costly. US unpredictability is hardening alliance expectations while economic interdependence with China continues to endure the political moment.
Australia’s own approach is anchored in what Foreign Minister Wong describes as its brand of “middle power diplomacy”. It presumes adaptation rather than departure in a moment of instability. “National interest” remains a mainstay of diplomatic statecraft but extending influence both regionally and globally will be the challenge.
Despite its institutional depth and economic scale, Canberra struggles to practice the kind of selective cooperation envisaged by Carney. In a pluralistic order, middle-power agility is constrained not by capacity alone, but by the narratives and commitments that anchor views of the national interest.
If regional integration remains an objective, the implications for the Pacific are profound. Carney’s vision will not materialise for middle powers like Australia simply through participation in global forums, but through their ability to carry their regions with them. In the Pacific, this means accepting that leadership comes at a price – economic, political, or both – and confronting whether Australia’s national interests are genuinely compatible with those of its neighbours, most critically on climate change.
