Carney defines his doctrine

Just over a year ago, we co-authored a long-form essay in The Hub that argued the United States was unilaterally surrendering from unipolarity. Washington, we wrote, was no longer willing to underwrite a liberal international order premised on open markets, multilateral institutions, and diffuse gains. Instead, it was choosing to behave like a historical great power, increasingly guided by a narrow conception of self-interest. We also argued that while Donald Trump was a particularly crude and performative messenger of this shift, the underlying change transcended him. The centre of gravity in Washington and the broader international system was moving. The language might soften or harden depending on who occupied the White House, but the direction of travel was clear. Canada and other middle powers would need to prepare for a different kind of world. Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos yesterday effectively diagnoses that change. What Carney describes as a “rupture” is, in effect, the end of the post-Cold War assumption that globalization (and liberal internationalism) would be both linear and benign. It’s a serious speech that deserves the attention and credit that it’s receiving. As he set out, the liberal rules-based order is no longer doing the work we continue to rhetorically assign to it. The era of what economist Dani Rodrik once called “hyperglobalization”—and what Carney terms “extreme global integration”—has revealed not just economic distortions, but geopolitical vulnerabilities. Supply chains have become instruments of leverage. Capital markets can be weaponized. Interdependence in an era of great power rivalry is now a source of fragility as much as prosperity. And this doesn’t even account for the populist backlash that we’ve seen in Western countries around the world in response to excesses of globalization like large-scale migration, the industrial and employment effects of the “China Shock,” and other costs and consequences of the past 40 years of political economy. We’d argue that the benefits still on balance outweighed the costs but it’s also true that we underestimated the harms to the so-called “losers” and in any case, the U.S. no longer wants to underwrite the whole system. Carney’s response is a call for “strategic autonomy”: more diversified trade, greater domestic capacity in critical sectors, and tighter coordination among middle powers to mitigate their asymmetry vis-à-vis the great powers. While the language is new, the instinct is not. In broad terms, this conception wouldn’t have been unfamiliar to former prime minister Stephen Harper. There’s a strong case that Harper could have delivered much of Carney’s Davos speech himself—including its nod to anti-communist dissident Václav Havel and its acknowledgement of the trade-offs embedded in modern globalization—albeit perhaps with fewer references to climate policy and sustainability. Indeed, Carney’s version of strategic autonomy resembles what Harper once called “enlightened sovereignty”: an outward-looking Canada, committed to markets and trade, but realistic about power, interests, and the limits of multilateral idealism. That continuity matters. It suggests that Carney’s argument is less a partisan departure than an overdue recognition of realities after a decade of the Trudeau government’s virtue signaling and empty posturing. Notably, Carney’s assessment of the end of the U.S.-led liberal order was effectively endorsed by U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who has been explicit that American trade and industrial policy will be unapologetically transactional. In other words, Carney isn’t describing a world of Canada’s choosing, but one to which Canada must respond. Still, the real test of Carney’s Davos doctrine will lie in the details. “Strategic autonomy” can easily become a euphemism for state-directed economic nationalism. If it degenerates into subsidy races, protectionism, and bureaucratic micromanagement of capital allocation, it will prove costly and counterproductive. But an equally serious risk lies in misinterpreting autonomy as simply a reorientation away from the United States and toward China. Trading one dependency for another would be a huge mistake. Carney’s own critique of extreme globalization should act as a guardrail here. If deep integration with authoritarian powers generated economic and political risks in the past, there’s no reason to believe those risks would diminish under a new label. We cannot trade dependency for dependency. If the global order is becoming more transactional, then Canada’s engagement with China should be transactional as well: cooperation where interests align, caution where they do not, and no illusion that deeper integration is inherently stabilizing. If Carney’s speech becomes the intellectual foundation for a new wave of indiscriminate economic nationalism—or for a naïve re-embrace of Chinese trade under a different vocabulary—it will age poorly. But if it’s taken for what it appears to be—a clear-eyed description of a world Canada did not choose but must now navigate—it may prove to be one of the most consequential foreign-policy speeches delivered by a Canadian prime minister in some time. The challenge ahead isn’t to resist Carney’s realism, but to apply it consistently and thoughtfully.