Prime Minister Mark Carney told the World Economic Forum in Davos on Tuesday, January 20, 2026, that the U.S.-led world order is in “the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” and urged middle powers to act together against economic coercion by great powers, warning that “if you are not at the table, you are on the menu.”
‘A rupture, not a transition’
Delivering a special address titled “Principled and Pragmatic: Canada’s Path” at the forum’s 56th annual meeting, Carney opened in French by describing “a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction, and the beginning of a harsh reality” in which great-power geopolitics is subject to no limits or constraints.
He argued that the rules-based order is fading and that the old assumption — that countries could hope compliance would buy safety — no longer holds. “Well, it won’t,” he said.
“Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” Carney said. He said great powers “have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, and supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited,” and that the multilateral institutions middle powers rely on — the WTO, the UN, the COP — are under threat.
The speech, delivered a day before U.S. President Donald Trump was to address the same gathering, did not name Trump. It was nonetheless widely read as an account of his impact on global affairs: the Greenland crisis and the tariff wars formed its backdrop.
Taking the sign out of the window
Carney built his argument around Václav Havel’s 1978 essay The Power of the Powerless and its greengrocer, who places a slogan he does not believe in his shop window to avoid trouble. Countries like Canada, he said, had done the same with the rules-based order.
“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient,” he said. American hegemony had nonetheless provided 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.”
“It is time for companies and countries to take their signs down,” he said.
A third path for middle powers
Carney’s alternative was not retreat. A “world of fortresses,” he warned, “will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable.” Instead, he laid out an approach drawn from what Finnish President Alexander Stubb has called “value-based realism” — being, in Carney’s words, “both principled and pragmatic.”
“Middle powers must act together because if you are not at the table, you are on the menu,” he said. “Great powers can afford to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity, and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not.”
Canada’s answer, he said, is “variable geometry” — different coalitions for different issues, based on common values and interests. He pointed to steps his government has taken: tax cuts, removing federal barriers to interprovincial trade, fast-tracking investment, doubling defence spending by the end of the decade, and a run of new trade and security partnerships, including with the European Union, China and Qatar in recent days.
On the issue hanging over the forum, he was explicit: “On Arctic sovereignty, we stand firmly with Greenland and Denmark and fully support their unique right to determine Greenland’s future.” Canada, he said, strongly opposes tariffs over Greenland.
He closed with the speech’s thesis in a single line: “We know the old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”
Ovation, then a rebuttal
The address drew a standing ovation — a rarity at Davos — and praise from other leaders. Finnish President Alexander Stubb called it one of the best speeches of the week; NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte said it showed “Canada is back.” Former ambassador Bob Rae compared its significance to Louis St. Laurent’s 1947 Gray Lecture, which defined Canada’s postwar role in the world.
The response from Washington came the next day. In his own Davos speech, Trump said: “Canada lives because of the United States,” and told Carney to remember it. Carney answered on January 22 in Quebec City: “Canada and the United States have built a remarkable partnership in the economy, in security, and in rich cultural exchange. But Canada doesn’t live because of the United States.”
