Matias Spektor
This month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney took the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos and delivered a blunt verdict on the international order. For decades, he argued, Western countries prospered by invoking a rules-based system that they knew was hypocritical. They cited liberal ideals while routinely exempting themselves from adhering to them, championed free trade while enforcing it selectively, and spoke the language of international law and human rights while applying those principles unevenly to friends and rivals. “We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality,” Carney acknowledged. This system was tolerable because it provided stability and because American power, despite its double standards, supplied the public goods that other Western countries depended on. But, in Carney’s words, “this bargain no longer works.”
This “rupture” in the international system, as Carney called it, stems from the collapse of that bargain. Powerful countries—namely the United States under President Donald Trump—are abandoning not only the rules that sustained the international order but also the pretense that their actions are and should be guided by principle. Carney is right that something fundamental has shifted. But in calling for middle and emerging powers to stop paying lip service to a broken system, he underestimates what else vanishes when pretense disappears.
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