Mark Carney and the Western Anxiety of Being Treated Like the Global South
When the “rules-based order” stops serving its architects, suddenly the system is broken, but only for them
The Hypocrisy of Carney’s “New World Order”: When Imperial Chickens Come Home to Roost
Mark Carney’s recent speech at Davos has sent shockwaves through the Western liberal intelligentsia. The Canadian Prime Minister’s acknowledgement that the so-called “rules-based international order” is dead has been treated as a revelation, a moment of brave truth-telling by someone finally willing to name what everyone can see. But this response itself reveals the profound ethnocentrism and wilful blindness at the heart of Western political discourse.
A Revelation Only to the Privileged
The most striking aspect of Carney’s speech is not what he said, but who needed to hear it. For the Global South, for Palestinians, for the victims of America’s “War on Terror”, and for countless nations subjected to Western intervention and exploitation, the fiction of a “rules-based order” has been transparently obvious for decades — if not centuries.
When Israeli forces demolished UNRWA headquarters in occupied East Jerusalem hours before Carney’s speech, when over 300 UNRWA workers had already been killed in Gaza, when genocidal language accompanied the systematic destruction of Palestinian life — where was the rules-based order then? When Iraq was invaded on fabricated evidence, when Libya was destroyed, when Syria collapsed, when Venezuela faced sanctions and coups, where were these rules?
The answer is simple: the rules were always working exactly as designed. They were rules for thee, not for me. Rules to be invoked when convenient for Western interests and ignored when inconvenient. The “international order” established after World War II was never about universal justice—it was about institutionalising Western hegemony in more palatable language.
The Ethnocentric Awakening
What prompted Carney’s sudden clarity? Not Sudan. Not Gaza. Not Venezuela. Not the millions displaced by Western interventions across the Middle East. It was Donald Trump’s threats against Canada and Greenland. The moment the American imperial appetite turned toward prosperous, white, Western nations, suddenly the mask slipped. Suddenly, a Western prime minister discovered that might makes right, that power trumps rules, and that the international order is simply organised violence with better PR.
This is the racism at the core of Carney’s intervention: he is prepared to be “principled” when it comes to Western countries like Canada and Denmark and “pragmatic” when it comes to Palestine and Venezuela. This double standard isn’t a bug in Western liberal thinking—it’s the operating system.
The Long Arc of Colonial Violence
The current moment cannot be understood without recognising it as the continuation of a much longer history. The “rules-based order” has always been the continuation of colonialism by other means, maintaining the same hierarchies of race, power, and extraction that characterised the explicit colonial period.
Scientific racism and Eurocentric universalism never went away — they simply put on suits and learnt to speak the language of international law and human rights while continuing to serve the same material interests. Western nations have continued to benefit enormously from this arrangement, extracting wealth and resources from the Global South through mechanisms of debt, trade agreements, structural adjustment, and, when necessary, direct military intervention.
The post-9/11 “War on Terror” exemplified this perfectly. It began with lies about Iraq, produced the chaos that birthed ISIS, destabilised entire regions through interventions in Libya and Syria, and killed millions — all while claiming to spread democracy and defend civilisation. The Arab Spring’s promise was systematically crushed, often with Western backing, because genuine self-determination in the Middle East has never been compatible with Western strategic interests.
Gaza: The Ultimate Test Case
The ongoing genocide in Gaza represents the complete collapse of any pretence that international law applies to Western allies. Israel’s actions — the systematic destruction of civilian infrastructure, the targeting of humanitarian workers, the explicit genocidal rhetoric from government officials, and the defiance of International Court of Justice rulings — constitute the most brazen violation of international law in decades.
And yet, neither Carney’s Canada nor any major Western power has suggested meaningful consequences. There is no talk of sanctions, of suspending Israel from the UN, or of arms embargoes. Instead, there are “concerns”, “condemnations”, and continued material support for the perpetrator.
This is the rules-based order in practice: Western allies can commit genocide with impunity while their victims are demonised as terrorists for resisting. The Greater Israel project continues with full American backing, and Palestinian resistance — no matter how justified under international law — is framed as Islamic extremism to be eliminated.
The American Collapse and Global Implications
What Carney’s speech inadvertently reveals is that America is collapsing from within and taking the global order down with it. The rise of Trumpism isn’t an aberration—it’s the internal logic of American imperialism coming home.
When you build a political culture on militarism, on the glorification of violence, on the systematic dehumanisation of the “other”, on the belief that might makes right — eventually, those weapons turn inward. The same logic that justified Abu Ghraib now justifies ICE raids. The same exceptionalism that allowed torture abroad now permits the crushing of domestic dissent. The private armies, the demonisation of minorities, the authoritarian populism — these are not deviations from American democracy but its logical conclusions.
Trump’s talk of annexing Greenland and invading Venezuela is simply American foreign policy without the euphemisms. It’s the same imperialism that has always existed, stripped of the liberal rhetorical packaging. And this is what terrifies Western leaders like Carney — not the imperialism itself, but its naked expression turning toward them.
Russia, China, and the Multipolar Reality
Meanwhile, the West faces challenges it cannot manage through its traditional tools. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine reveals that Cold War-era imperial ambitions are not unique to the West. China’s rise represents an economic and technological competitor that cannot be simply bombed into submission or sanctioned into compliance.
The unipolar moment is over. The world is reorganising into spheres of influence, competing blocs, and weaponised supply chains. The technocratic management that Carney still hopes can stabilise the situation — smarter regulation, better coordination, elite stewardship — is woefully inadequate to this reality.
As Andrew Latham notes in his analysis of Carney’s speech, understanding collapse doesn’t equal the power to manage it. Middle powers like Canada may see clearly what’s happening, but they lack the material capacity to shape what comes next. Influence flows from power, not posturing. Awareness without leverage is simply well-informed impotence.
The Interregnum and Its Monsters
Antonio Gramsci warned that when an old order dies and a new one struggles to be born, the interregnum produces monsters. But the monsters are not Trump or Putin — they are the structural realities of a world system in collapse.
The monster is a global order built on extraction and violence that can no longer sustain itself. The monster is climate catastrophe born of the endless growth imperative. The monster is the refugee crisis produced by the very interventions Western nations now use to justify closing borders. The monster is the rise of fascism as the last gasp of a failing system that has run out of external enemies and turns its violence inward.
What Comes Next?
Carney represents a dying order trying to salvage itself, hoping that the old rules can be reformed and that the system can be made sustainable with better management. But you cannot reform a structure whose very foundation is domination. You cannot create a just global order while maintaining the fundamental hierarchies that produced injustice.
The question facing us is not how to restore the rules-based order — it cannot and should not be restored. The question is whether a genuinely multipolar world, one not organised around Western hegemony, can produce something more just, or whether we descend into competing imperialisms and escalating conflict.
For the Global South, for Palestinians, for all those who have suffered under the old order, its collapse is not a tragedy to be mourned but a long-overdue reckoning. The tragedy would be if Western nations learnt nothing from this moment, if they simply mourned their lost privileges while failing to confront the violence on which those privileges were built.
The chickens have indeed come home to roost. The imperial order that Carney’s Canada benefited from is consuming itself. The only question now is whether we can build something better from the ruins or whether the collapse will pull everyone down together. That answer depends on whether Western nations can finally see beyond their own interests and recognise the humanity they’ve spent centuries denying.
The old world order is dead. Good. Now the real work of building a just one can begin — if we have the courage to face what that actually requires.
Latham, Andrew. “Mark Carney is right about the end of the old order—and that’s the problem.” The Hill, January 23, 2026.
Oborne, Peter. “Carney wants a new world order — but only for the West.” Middle East Eye, January 23, 2026.