States like Canada have long known the current system of international rules-based order is a “fiction,” Carney said.
By Sharon Zhang , Truthout, January 20, 2026
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In an unusually candid speech in Davos, Switzerland, on Tuesday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned that world order is at a “rupture” point due to the U.S.’s longstanding vise-grip on the world and its swiftly expanding authoritarian nature under President Donald Trump.
Skewering “American hegemony,” Carney said that countries like Canada have long known that the idea of the international rules-based order was a “fiction” that states nonetheless signaled their support for in order to be granted access to crucial goods, trade, and other resources like finance.
For decades, states with “middle” amounts of power like Canada “participated in the rituals, and largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality,” Carney said. In return, the U.S. allowed other states access to important systems.
“This bargain no longer works,” Carney told the World Economic Forum. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
But, over the past two decades, great powers like the U.S. are increasingly using “economic integration as weapons,” he said. This is causing countries to retreat into themselves, becoming less reliant on outside sources — which Carney warned will lead to greater fragmentation and volatility.
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“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,” he said.
Countries like Canada “compete with each other to be the most accommodating,” he said. “This is not sovereignty. It is the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.”
He calls for countries to form a third path, one of greater cooperation, in order to push back against the threats by major powers. Doing this would require dispensing with simply signalling support for global order in favor of redoubling efforts to actually enforce principles like those laid out in the UN charter, he said.
“We should not allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity, and rules will remain strong if we choose to wield it together,” he said. Countries must “stop invoking the ‘rules-based international order’ as though it still functions as advertised. Call the system what it is: a period where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as a weapon of coercion.”
The speech comes just weeks after German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier similarly said that the U.S. is ending world order as it’s known, and instead turning the world “into a den of robbers, where the most unscrupulous take whatever they want” and countries are “treated as the property of a few great powers.”
Carney and Steinmeier both, perhaps, ignore their countries’ respective responsibilities for the erosion of the enforcement of international order — in their support for Israel’s genocide in Gaza, their contributions to the global system of imperialism, and their participation in an increasing crackdown on asylum and immigration by wealthy countries, among other actions.
However, many experts have noted the vast erosion of international principles brought on by the U.S. in particular, which is accelerating under Trump.
Amnesty International USA warned in a report on Tuesday, the anniversary of Trump’s inauguration, that Trump’s first year has led to a “human rights emergency” in which the administration is “cracking the pillars of a free society.”
“At stake are the rights that enable people to defend all other rights and live without fear from the arbitrary exercise of power and discrimination, including the rights to freedom of the press, expression, and peaceful protest; a fair trial and due process; equality and non-discrimination; and privacy,” the report said. “When these rights are weakened, the harms do not stay contained — they spread.”
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about:blank This article is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), and you are free to share and republish under the terms of the license.
Sharon Zhang is a news writer at Truthout covering politics, climate and labor. Before coming to Truthout, Sharon had written stories for Pacific Standard, The New Republic, and more. She has a master’s degree in environmental studies. She can be found on Twitter and Bluesky.
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