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

Speaking yesterday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Prime Minister Mark Carney declared that the so-called “rules-based international order” is over. He warned that middle powers face a world defined by coercion rather than cooperation, urged renewed commitment to territorial integrity and sovereignty, and called for greater unity among countries caught between resurgent great-power rivalry.

Carney is right that the old order is not coming back. He is right that sovereignty matters, and that Canada and its partners cannot rely on geography or historic alliances to guarantee security or prosperity. But where his remarks fall short is in their insistence on answering the crises of our time through the lens of neoliberalism—an ideology that has, for decades, hollowed out the very sovereignty he now claims to defend.

In other words, Carney diagnoses a rupture in the global order while leaving intact the economic framework that helped produce it. Neoliberalism is not guided by sovereign states exercising democratic control, but by the steady transfer of power to non-state actors: multinational corporations and the ultra-wealthy. This is the critical point at which Carney’s Davos speech diverges from a comprehensive view of reality.

His intervention, then, is better understood as a critique of liberal international relations—the belief that norms, institutions, and shared rules can restrain hard power—than as a........

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