Mark Carney’s Davos speech is a blunt diagnosis of a world in rupture, where power now trumps rules and coercion is openly deployed. The answer, it argues, is collective action by middle powers – a modern “third path” that resists subordination and rebuilds leverage.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Davos speech signals there may still be a leader in the West worth following.

“Middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” he warned. Carney was brutally honest about Western conduct in the world but shone a bright light on a better path forward.

At a time when the US has pivoted to a smash-and-grab deployment of hard power that now extends to its closest allies, Carney stepped up. The speech wasn’t a rhetorical tour de force; it was better than that: it was a declaration by the leader of a major, middle ranked Western power that the snivelling compliance, the fawning and the keep-your-head-down approach that has typified the collective West’s response to Trumpism is at a strategic dead end. We are at a moment which Carney defines as “a rupture in the world order”.  

“We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy,” Carney said.

At a time when the US is led by a criminal toddler who can’t stop whining about not getting the Nobel Peace Prize even as he attacks country after country, it is refreshing to encounter a leader who thinks and speaks like a statesman of the first rank. 

Carney did not reference the Non-aligned movement formed at the Belgrade Conference in September 1961 but it leapt to my mind when I heard him say:

“In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in between have a choice: compete with each other for........

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