Carney Warns US Hegemony Threatens Global Order
- States like Canada have long known the current system of international rules-based order is a "fiction," Carney said.
- 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...
- 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...
By Sharon zhang
This article was originally published by Truthout
States like Canada have long known the current system of international rules-based order is a “fiction,” Carney said.
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.
“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 indeed 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