A belated confession!

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the global system’s main debate platform, left a strong mark on the agenda. Carney said that the Western-centered, rules-based, liberal international order has collapsed due to the “Trump effect.”

I added the phrase “Trump effect.” Because Carney did not mention Trump by name in his speech. Yet Carney’s arguments were clearly linked to the shock caused by Trump’s initiatives regarding Canada and Greenland. Israel’s Western-backed genocide in Gaza had already laid bare the illusion of a rules-based order. Of course, Carney did not mention Gaza or Venezuela either. Nor did he speak of the other aftershocks that are expected to follow.

Carney is not an ordinary politician. As a leading representative of the global financial system with a “liberal internationalist” identity, Carney spent 13 years in senior positions at Goldman Sachs and also served as governor of both the Bank of England and the Bank of Canada.

Carney was referring to Václav Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless, which circulated hand to hand as an underground publication in the 1970s. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Havel was elected first president of Czechoslovakia and later of the Czech Republic. As a dissident intellectual, Havel described the powerlessness of society within the Soviet system. He argued that individuals pretended that everything was fine and described this powerlessness as “living within a lie.” Carney, too, describes the order he represents as “living within a lie.”

Carney was calling on Western leaders, as the primary beneficiaries of this order, to admit that the system they are part of is a “system of lies.” Yet it was Palestinians, above all, who were the victims of this order. Palestinians had experienced the falseness of the rules-based, liberal international legal order painfully not just in recent years, but for much longer.

Many leading Western countries, including Canada, fully supported Israel’s genocide. When Trump nudged Canada, Greenland, or more broadly Western Europe with the tip of a wedge, the truth suddenly burst into the open. Liberal Westerners were suddenly enlightened, like rabbits frozen in headlights. In a sense, Trump held up a mirror to the West. However, Trump’s mirror was not a funhouse “hall of mirrors” that distorted reflections.

In his speech, Carney said they already knew that liberal rules were applied in favor of the powerful and that international law was interpreted depending on the identity of the victim and the perpetrator. He noted that Western leaders participated in this fake spectacle and its rituals, saying that “we largely ignored the gap between rhetoric and reality.” In other words, Carney was admitting that the international order is a theater staged before the world’s nations.

Trump acted like an usher in old movie theaters, guiding audiences to their seats with a flashlight. Trump is not the destroyer of the liberal, rules-based international order, but the crude exposer of its collapse. By scraping away the paint with a trowel, Trump revealed what lay beneath a system that had long been presented delicately and wrapped in flattering rhetoric, yet had always worked against weak, non-Western countries. By throwing in the faces of the participants the truths they all knew but never voiced, Trump is saying, “This is an empire, and I am your emperor.”

The international order was a corpse that appeared alive but was in fact stuffed with straw. The priests of the order had made people believe that the corpse was alive and that its organs were functioning properly. The priests of the game conditioned the benefits enjoyed by its participants on behaving in accordance with the game’s rulebook. And the first rule of that rulebook was not to reveal that it was a game. “Denial of the game” was the first rule.

Carney says that “the system’s strength comes not from its reality, but from everyone’s willingness to act as if it were real. And its fragility comes from the same source,” arguing that denial is now useless. Trump, meanwhile, poked the corpse, and it scattered, leaving behind a great cloud of dust. In this way, the system’s falseness fully revealed itself.

Carney was declaring that the old order—its wig fallen off, its face paint running, the sequins on its costume spilling away—would not return. In short, Carney was saying, “we are at the horizon of an irreversible evening; it is very late.” In other words, he was announcing that the international order is “dead.”