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How do middle powers work to uphold existing international rules and norms (Getty Images)

Middle powers can’t run the world

Mark Carney’s vision for a New World Order may be too good to be true.

Connor O’Brien,Quah Say Jye

23 January 20264 min read

It is remarkable that, at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney felt compelled to compare abiding faith in the “international rules-based order” to Václav Havel’s portrayal of high communist propaganda. Carney’s speech sought to shock the commentariat, and indeed most world leaders, out of complacency so that they finally reckon with the current moment’s historical significance. It has already been met with well-deserved acclaim. Yet it remains unclear whether Western wishful thinking underpins the international order’s unfolding crisis, rather than changing strategic realities on the ground. These realities go far beyond semantics.

Carney’s speech marks a watershed in the ever-widening rift between the United States and its closest allies and partners. It is first and foremost a cry to stop, in Havelian terms, “living within the lie” of the post-Second World War international order. For Carney, this order – despite its hypocrisy and inconsistency – proved essential for underwriting collective security and global economic governance. His diagnosis of the rupture is compelling: the spiralling exploitation of weaponised interdependence leaves middle powers vulnerable to hegemonic predations, and its transactional logic is prone to ever-diminishing returns.

Carney’s solution is primarily psychic. By abandoning the international order’s “rituals”, middle powers can finally reckon with their changed circumstances and hence begin to “develop greater strategic autonomy”. This autonomy comes, in Carney’s vision, from diplomatic hedging, national self-reliance, and issue-based coalitions in response to global problems. This “third path” is one on which middle powers can allegedly band together to resist hegemonic coercion and defend their shared interests.

The brilliance of Carney’s speech is that it teeters on the edge of implausibility. By eliding areas of sustained great-power supremacy – from US dollar hegemony to China’s green manufacturing dominance – Carney makes a global middle-power alliance thinkable. His vision renders middle-power strategic autonomy a question of political will rather than power, or even diplomatic possibility. And it taps into a growing appetite for international cooperation beyond the United States and China among current and former leaders such as Emmanuel Macron, Lawrence Wong and Malcolm Turnbull. Where Carney differs is in his denunciation of the prevailing “nostalgia” for the post-Second World War order, which has shaped much thinking on how middle powers could work to uphold existing international rules and norms.

There is no escaping the dilemmas posed by the resurgence of overt geopolitical competition and wavering faith in status quo economic and security governance.

Though Carney’s rhetoric is enticing, the problems facing his vision are severe. The first concerns US-China rivalry. In pursuing collective strategic autonomy, middle powers would likely calibrate their engagement with the United States and China very differently. Canada’s recent pivot towards China is made easier by its relative distance, as well as its comparative proximity to the United States. Australia, Singapore, and much of Europe would likely reach idiosyncratic conclusions, diminishing the prospects for collective middle-power bargaining. With each middle power charting its own course, Carney’s vision looks like a much more conventional story of diplomatic hedging that has little connection to macro-level questions of international order.

The second concern is the absence of the Global South. Any vision that does not place India, Indonesia, Vietnam, and other rising powers at its centre risks fighting the last war. That each retains strong ties with Russia, for example, points to the failures of developed states to draw their Global South counterparts out from Cold War-era fault lines, undermining the prospects for post-hegemonic cooperation. And as the European Union’s recent political strife regarding its trade negotiations with the South American trade bloc Mercosur indicates, bilateral and regional trade integration remains contested across the developed world. Will wealthy middle powers really accept the geoeconomic bargains necessary to decrease their dependence on the United States and China? After all, domestic battles over trade are products of economic structure and political polarisation, not just elite sentimentality regarding international rules.

Finally, Carney’s vision provides few tools for managing geopolitical competition. Two issues stand out: the lack of guardrails regarding environmental and security-related trade protectionism, and the prospect of nuclear proliferation in Europe and East Asia. Ad hoc coalitions cannot deliver the genuinely global regulation needed on these issues. And whereas the latter demands the enforcement of existing international legal commitments, the former presents an unresolved intellectual puzzle, as trade officials struggle to redefine the boundaries of legitimacy for tariffs and subsidies. International institutions with universal membership will likely remain central for resolving these quandaries.

There is thus a danger that Carney’s vision could encourage similar delusions to those he critiques. There is no escaping the dilemmas posed by the resurgence of overt geopolitical competition and wavering faith in status quo economic and security governance. Individual self-reliance and issue-based coalitions can only go so far. It is only by reckoning with the underlying material drivers of the global order’s unravelling, as well as broader historical sources of disaffection both within and beyond the West, that it can be made anew.

About the authors

Connor O’Brien

Connor O’Brien is a PhD student at the University of Cambridge, specialising in international political economy.

Quah Say Jye

Quah Say Jye is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge.

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