The Davos speech the world should heed

Unlike the most anticipated address at Davos made from a bully pulpit on Wednesday, Canadian PM Mark Carney's speech a day before may have sounded like an innocuous sermon from a snow-clad mount. But his was a stand-out, blunt reminder that the world order is parading 'naked'. Middle powers, he told the Davos nobility, continue to dutifully hang the 'rules-based international order' sign from shopfronts in an era of Toll Troll Trump - knowing fully well it's now fiction. Like Hans Christian Andersen's emperor, Trump's US struts about in 'invisible robes', while allies are forced to applaud the tailoring. The ritual gains traction as no one dares to call the global system what it is: a convenient lie, with Trump getting away on almost all fronts.

Big powers (read: China and the US) now weaponise integration - tariffs as cudgels, supply chains as choke points, finance as coercion. The old Teddy Roosevelt line, 'Speak softly and carry a big stick' has been replaced with 'Shout your head off and carry a big stick'. Multilateral institutions, once the wardrobe of legitimacy, are threadbare. To keep pretending is not prudence but self-delusion. In Andersen's story, the emperor's courtiers feared ridicule more than reality. So do many governments today, clinging to the faded fabric of 'rules' while the strong exempt themselves at will. The danger is middle powers negotiating bilaterally with hegemons, mistaking 'strategic' subordination for sovereignty.

Carney's solution is 'values-based realism' - principled enough to defend sovereignty and rights, pragmatic enough to build coalitions issue by issue. It's a wager that diversification and collective resilience can stitch together something sturdier. Naming reality - 'The emperor has no clothes!' - isn't naivete but strategy. Saying something and thinking something else, as is being done with Trump, risks normalising acquiescence to the rent-a-threat, real estate developer-president. A world of fortresses beckons. But so does a world of tactical cooperation - if enough voices call out the BS.