Mark Carney’s Davos Warning: The Rules-Based Order Is Dead

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At WEF Davos, Canada PM Mark Carney invokes Václav Havel. He argues that the rules-based international order has collapsed. Carney warns that nations that “go along to get along” will pay the price.

By TRH World Desk

New Delhi, January 21, 2026 — Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney did not come to Davos to soothe nerves. He came to deliver a reckoning.

In a speech that cut sharply against the diplomatic evasions typical of the World Economic Forum, Carney declared that the rules-based international order—the phrase that framed global politics for nearly four decades—is no longer merely eroding. It has ruptured.

Invoking Thucydides’ brutal maxim—the strong do what they can, the weak suffer what they must—Carney rejected the growing fatalism that treats great-power coercion as inevitable. The real danger, he warned, is not raw power but quiet compliance.

To explain why, Carney reached back to Václav Havel’s famous essay The Power of the Powerless. Havel’s parable of the green grocer—who displays a slogan he does not believe simply to avoid trouble—was not a historical aside. It was an accusation.

For decades, Carney argued, countries and corporations placed the “rules-based order” sign in their window. They knew the truth was messier: international law applied selectively, trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and the strongest powers exempted themselves when convenient. Yet the fiction worked—because American hegemony provided stability, open sea lanes, financial order, and collective security.

That bargain, Carney said bluntly, no longer holds.

What replaces it is not a smooth transition but a rupture. A world where compliance does not buy safety, where silence does not guarantee stability, and where pretending no longer protects prosperity. In such a system, “going along to get along” becomes a strategic failure, not prudence.

Carney’s most provocative line was also his simplest: It is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.

The implication was unmistakable. Whether on trade coercion, security dependencies, or geopolitical intimidation, the cost of living within a lie now exceeds the cost of speaking plainly. The illusion that rituals alone can sustain order is cracking.

Davos has heard many speeches about uncertainty. Carney’s was different. It named the moment for what it is: not the end of history, but the end of pretending.