Carney’s Davos speech is being praised as visionary, but its power comes partly from an uncomfortable truth: it is a confession that the “rules‑based order” was always a partial lie that Western states accepted for as long as they were the main beneficiaries.

 

What Carney openly admitted

Carney’s most striking line is his admission that Western governments “knew the story of the international rules‑based order was partially false.” They knew the strongest “would exempt themselves when convenient,” that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and that international law applied “with varied rigour” depending on who was hurt.
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He describes how countries like Canada “placed the sign in the window” and “participated in the rituals” of this order, avoiding calling out the gap between rhetoric and reality because the fiction was useful and American hegemony delivered public goods: open sea lanes, a stable financial system, and military protection.

Carney then declares that “this bargain no longer works” and that the world is in “a rupture, not a transition,” because great powers have begun using economic integration itself as a weapon: “tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.”

 

Coercion long before the rupture

What your comment highlights is that this “coercion through power” is not new; it has simply moved closer to the West’s own skin. For decades, U.S. and allied power was projected most brutally in the Middle East, parts of Asia, Latin America and Africa, while Western publics were told they lived under a benign order.

 

Examples include:

 

Repeated U.S.‑backed coups and covert regime‑change operations from Iran (1953) through Latin America and the Cold War “colour revolutions,” documented even by American and European researchers as tools to secure strategic and energy interests.

Large‑scale interventions such as the 2003 Iraq invasion, which senior U.S. officials later admitted had “catastrophic” outcomes and helped breed the very instability and extremism the “war on terror” was supposed to contain.
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These were not marginal episodes; they were the working reality of “order” for people in Baghdad, Kabul, Gaza, Tripoli, Tehran and beyond. Western governments largely defended them as necessary, legal, or at worst “mistakes,” while still invoking the language of rules and human rights.

 

When the West was conveniently quiet

Carney’s words about “performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination” could equally describe how many Western middle powers behaved when the United States and key allies coerced or punished others.

 

Some patterns of convenient silence:

• Economic strangulation: sweeping U.S. sanctions on countries such as Iran or Iraq (1990s) produced massive humanitarian costs, but NATO allies mostly complied and rarely challenged the legality or morality of using the global dollar and financial system as a weapon.
• Security partnerships: Western states deepened arms sales and intelligence cooperation with Gulf monarchies despite wars in Yemen and systematic domestic repression, while continuing to speak of “shared values” and “regional stability.”
• Selective international law: European and North American governments invoked international law fiercely in cases like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, yet have been far more equivocal—or openly obstructive—when UN bodies scrutinised allies’ actions in Gaza or other theatres. Critical commentators reading Carney’s speech explicitly note this double standard.

For much of this period, middle powers “competed to be the most accommodating” to Washington, precisely as Carney admits, because access to markets, finance and security guarantees outweighed any discomfort with how others were treated.

 

Why has the tone changed now

The tide is turning because the tools once used mainly against “outliers” and distant regions are now being aimed, more openly, at rich allies. Carney’s own examples are telling.

 

He describes how:

• Tariffs and trade access are now openly used to discipline allies, not just rivals. Commentators point to U.S. tariff threats against Canada, the EU and others, as well as Trump‑era blackmail over defence spending and trade deals.
• Financial plumbing (SWIFT access, secondary sanctions, dollar clearing) is so weaponised that even allied banks and firms face extraterritorial punishment if they disobey Washington’s line on Iran, Russia or China.
• Supply chains for energy, critical minerals and advanced technology have become instruments of pressure, from U.S. controls on high‑end chips to Chinese restrictions on rare earths and strategic materials.

 

Carney’s audience in Davos—corporate leaders, Western policymakers, allied governments—now feel exposed to the same arbitrary leverage that many in the Global South have experienced for decades. Hence the new willingness to label the system coercive and to call the old order a “fiction.”

 

The opportunity and the risk in Carney’s “third path”

Carney’s answer is a call for middle powers to “live in truth” instead of illusion:

• Stop pretending that a neutral, rule‑bound order exists when the strongest routinely opt out.
• Recognise that obeying every demand of a hegemon is “the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.”
• Band together in coalitions that can say “no” to great‑power intimidation—“if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”

 

From a Global South perspective, this is both promising and problematic. Promising, because a G7 leader is finally speaking the language of asymmetry, coercion and hypocrisy that activists, scholars and governments in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America have used for years.

 

Problematic, because unless Western middle powers apply these principles consistently—to allies as well as adversaries—the “third path” may simply become a rebranded, more self‑aware Western bloc that still protects its own interests first while others remain on the receiving end of sanctions, interventions and economic pressure. Critics of the speech already note that Canada and Germany, for instance, have backed coercive policies they now decry when turned against them.

 

The truly thought‑provoking question Carney raises—perhaps unintentionally—is not just “How do we protect ourselves now that the gorilla has started hitting us?” but “Are we prepared to dismantle a coercive system we helped build, even when doing so forces us to confront our own past silences and complicity?”