The Carney Doctrine Can Be More Than a Davos Speech |
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At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a strategic emancipation proclamation. The international order is rupturing, he candidly assessed, forcing small and midsize countries to make hard and undignified choices as they struggle to survive in a world of bullying great powers. The imagined community sustained by universal rules, international law, and multilateral institutions never fully constrained these giants, but now even the pretense that it can is in tatters.
“The world has changed. Washington has changed. There is almost nothing normal now in the United States,” Carney told Canada’s House of Commons at the end of a particularly stormy January.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered a strategic emancipation proclamation. The international order is rupturing, he candidly assessed, forcing small and midsize countries to make hard and undignified choices as they struggle to survive in a world of bullying great powers. The imagined community sustained by universal rules, international law, and multilateral institutions never fully constrained these giants, but now even the pretense that it can is in tatters.
“The world has changed. Washington has changed. There is almost nothing normal now in the United States,” Carney told Canada’s House of Commons at the end of a particularly stormy January.
The two-time former central bank chief’s proposed solution is to broaden the base of middle powers’ security and prosperity away from overdependence on an unreliable hegemon and hobbled multilateral organizations.
Now dubbed the “Carney Doctrine,” his concept of “variable geometry” diplomacy addresses a fundamental contradiction in legacy institutions such as NATO: a United States frustrated that its allies never do enough to help deter Russia or constrain China as middle powers chafing under the structure of institutions designed by Washington to ensure its own primacy, inculcate dependence, and discourage independent strategic options—while the United States itself only selectively follows the norms it forces on others.
Without credibly enforced rules, interdependence with systemic rivals increases the risk of coercion. Complying with big powers’ demands doesn’t buy safety, Carney warned. It only spurs them to come back for more. But his case, based on his articles and speeches and on my conversations on background with people close to him, is bigger than just that. Rather than revealing weakness by accommodating norm-violating behavior, Carney argues, middle powers must take more responsibility for defending their own sovereignty. Stability and progress come not through confrontation or moral absolutism but by preserving limited cooperation while pragmatically adapting to material realities. The liberal principle that systems bound by rules can reduce the payoffs from thuggery is still valid, but the mechanisms need updating. In a world in which power dynamics are constantly tested and renegotiated, where adversaries probe and allies hedge, flexibility is a virtue.
Smaller, more adaptable groups of trusted partners already exist, of course. Carney’s strategy would invest more in them to provide........