Ahead of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s visit to Australia next month, it is time to ask will Australia embrace Carney’s call to harness middle power clout.

Are Canada and Australia aligned in response to the touted collapse of global order? A person of interest, in a red cap and tie, is alleged to have lit a fire under the international rules-based order. UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres, at Munich 2025, warned “multilateral institutions are under assault”, obliquely referring to “some [who] put the UN on death watch”. At Davos, having scared the daylights out of his allies with his Greenland demands, Trump touted the US as a “stabilising force”. In his Davos tour d’horizon Canada's Mark Carney came right out and said that the US-led global order is “fading away” to the point where “the very architecture of collective problem-solving [is] under threat.” The Munich Security Report 2026 actually cited Trump by name for “taking an axe to existing rules and institutions.”

Describing what is happening as “rupture” rather than “transition”, Carney endorsed Finland President Stubb’s “value-based realism”, combining core liberal values with a realistic world view. Stubbs discerned a “hinge moment” during which states would adapt to “three major forces”, the Global West, Global East and Global South. Carney focused on middle power strategies of diverse cooperation to compensate for........

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