Australia, explained.
Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney delivers a speech during the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos on 20 January 2026 (Fabrice Coffrini/Getty Images)
"When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself."
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"A rupture, not a transition": Carney's new order"A rupture, not a transition": Carney's new order
Canadians are known for being polite rather than blunt, which makes this rather extraordinary speech from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney at the World Economic Forum yesterday all the more notable. Here's a long quote, followed by a short observation:
In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, 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, the shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world unite.” He doesn’t believe in it. No one does. But he places the 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.
Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.
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 varied 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.
Let me be direct. 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. But more recently, 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.
The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied — the WTO, the UN, the COP, the very architecture of collective problem solving — are under threat. 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. And this impulse is understandable.
A country that cannot 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.
Carney's cri de coeur must of course be read in the context of the extraordinary threats and provocations President Trump has made against Canada since assuming office in January 2025, the latest being his posting of an image on social media of him in the Oval Office in front of a map depicting Canada as American territory. But Canada has been subject to Chinese coercion in recent years too, and despite Carney's recent warm visit to Beijing, it would be a mistake to think Canada is lurching towards full-scale accommodation and partnership with Beijing. Carney's Davos remarks were directed at all great powers.
Still, Trump's behaviour has to be treated as the most proximate cause, and as an Australian, one does immediately ask oneself what would need to happen in the US-Australia relationship for an Australian prime minister to deliver a similar speech.
One thing we can say is that Australia is better placed than Canada to survive and thrive in the world Carney depicts. For Canada, there is simply no escape from geography. One of its leading intellectuals, Michael Ignatieff, addressed this issue in a bracingly direct essay on his Substack in July 2025, after Trump had publicly mused about Canada becoming America's 51st state. Ignatieff exposes painful questions about Canada's relationship with its giant neighbour, questions that Australia simply doesn't need to confront because it is so much further away. For all Carney's talk of sovereignty, Australia is freer to make sovereign decisions than Canada can ever be.
About the author
Sam Roggeveen
Sam Roggeveen is Program Director of the Lowy Institute’s International Security Program. He is the author of The Echidna Strategy: Australia's Search for Power and Peace (Opens in new window), published by La Trobe University Press in 2023.
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