This month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney took the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos and delivered a blunt verdict on the international order. For decades, he argued, Western countries prospered by invoking a rules-based system that they knew was hypocritical. They cited liberal ideals while routinely exempting themselves from adhering to them, championed free trade while enforcing it selectively, and spoke the language of international law and human rights while applying those principles unevenly to friends and rivals. “We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality,” Carney acknowledged. This system was tolerable because it provided stability and because American power, despite its double standards, supplied the public goods that other Western countries depended on. But, in Carney’s words, “this bargain no longer works.”

This “rupture” in the international system, as Carney called it, stems from the collapse of that bargain. Powerful countries—namely the United States under President Donald Trump—are abandoning not only the rules that sustained the international order but also the pretense that their actions are and should be guided by principle. Carney is right that something fundamental has shifted. But in calling for middle and emerging powers to stop paying lip service to a broken system, he underestimates what else vanishes when pretense disappears.

Carney insisted that smaller countries, such as Canada, could still uphold certain liberal values even as the overarching “rules-based order” faded away. It remains altogether unclear how middle powers could pull off such a salvage job, and whether any international, values-based regime can arise from the wreckage left by the United States. That is worrying. A world in which powerful states no longer feel compelled to justify themselves morally is not more honest—it is more dangerous. When great powers feel obliged to justify their behavior in moral terms, weaker states gain leverage. They can appeal to shared standards, invoke international law, and demand consistency between rhetoric and action. But without the need to maintain even the fiction of principle, a powerful country can do what it pleases knowing that it can be constrained only by the power of others. The instability this breeds will not spare even the strong.

Hypocrisy has long played a double role in international politics. It has bred resentment and distrust between global powers, but it has also constrained power by making states answerable to the moral standards they claim to uphold. Throughout the Cold War, the United States justified its leading role in the international order by using the language of democracy and human rights, even as its actions fell short of those ideals. That hypocrisy did not go uncontested. Allies and nonaligned states alike repeatedly invoked American rhetoric to criticize U.S. behavior and demand greater consistency between the principles the United States was championing and what the country was doing in practice. This pressure yielded tangible results. For instance, domestic and international scrutiny prompted a congressional investigation by the 1975 Church Committee into the conduct of the U.S. intelligence community, including its covert operations abroad. The committee’s findings reshaped oversight of U.S. intelligence operations and elevated human rights as a meaningful consideration in foreign policy decisions.

That pressure persisted into the post–Cold War era. When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, it justified the war by invoking international law and the threat of weapons of mass destruction. These arguments collapsed because the weapons never materialized. The international backlash to the invasion was severe precisely because Washington had claimed to operate within a rules-based order. A similar dynamic later surrounded the use of drone strikes by the United States across multiple countries. As the U.S. drone program expanded under several administrations, international lawyers, allies, and civil society groups cited American commitments to due process and the rule of law to demand accountability for the killings. In response,........

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