Mark Carney at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, January 20, 2026. Photo by Ciaran McCrickard/Flickr.

In the current paranoid atmosphere, it would not be surprising if some people aren’t wondering if Mark Carney is a Russian agent. For in his speech in Davos on Tuesday, the Canadian prime minister made remarks that if uttered by the likes of me would have critics muttering about “Kremlin talking points.”

Senior Russian officials like President Vladmir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have long complained that Western states operate double standards, that their politicians are hypocrites, and that the so-called “rules-based international order” (always put in quotation marks) involves one set of rules for the West and another set of rules for everybody else.

It seems that Carney agrees. In his much-discussed speech at the World Economic Forum this week, he declared: “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying degrees of rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”

“This fiction was useful,” said Carney. Canada benefitted from it, and so, “we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works.”

American political scientist Richard Falk once described humanitarian intervention as being like the Mississippi river—“it flows in only one direction.” Falk wrote this in the 1990s, when politicians and philosophers in the West pushed the idea that state sovereignty was limited, and that states that abused human rights were, in essence, fair game for intervention by Western liberal........

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