The GeoObserver

Davos, Carney and the staged revolt against American hegemony Does Carney’s WEF speech herald a sincere embrace of multipolarity — and rejection of US hegemony — or a mere rebranding of empire? Many critics of US imperialism hailed Carney’s speech as historic. ... Such enthusiasm is understandable. A senior Western leader openly questioning American hegemony, exposing the “rules-based order” as a fiction and calling for coordinated resistance by middle powers — while being applauded by the Western establishment — is undeniably significant. Yet I believe a more sober and critical reading is required. A first point to note is that, for all his calls for truth-telling, Carney’s speech was remarkably evasive. While he conceded that “international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim”, this formulation is an extreme euphemism. A genuinely honest account would have named the reality behind this asymmetry: decades of violence inflicted on the Global South through exploitation, coercion, subversion, regime change and war — violence actively supported by US vassals, including Canada. ... One might therefore say that an honest appraisal of the US-led “rules-based order” would have to acknowledge not just its failures, but its truly criminal consequences — and Canada’s complicity in them. Yet Carney not only glossed over this, but indeed argued that this very order enabled Canada to “pursue value-based foreign policies”, the very policies he now claims Trump is obstructing and that Canada and other states must seek to pursue independently. In doing so, Carney appears to uphold the very fiction he claims to be demolishing. The same applies to his claim that only now — under Trump — has the world entered a ruthless age of power politics in which “the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must”, or that only now has the United States begun using “economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion”. This “Year Zero” narrative is deeply disingenuous. In fact, the weaponisation of economic relations and the brutal consequences of sanctions have been a reality for decades – one in which Canada has similarly been actively complicit in. ... To suggest that only recent US policy has turned economic instruments into weapons obscures the long history of Western coercive economic measures that have inflicted immense suffering on civilian populations, particularly in the Global South. The same “Year Zero” narrative also underpins Carney’s comments on sovereignty. In his speech, he implies that integration with the United States has only now — under Trump — come to entail subordination for second-tier Western countries. In reality, this has always been the case. Since the end of the Second World War, Western states have been politically, economically and militarily subordinated to the United States. It is often argued that these countries benefited from their subimperial role within the US-led system. But such benefits were never evenly distributed. Even within the West, alternative models of socioeconomic organisation — greater redistribution of wealth, resource nationalism or non-aligned foreign policies — were systematically foreclosed. This was achieved not only through economic pressure and political manipulation, but, at times, through covert and overt violence, including rogue operations carried out by Western military, intelligence and security services, typically under US direction, with the explicit aim of suppressing the left. In this context, Western leaders aligned themselves with the US-managed order primarily in pursuit of their own class and personal interests, rather than those of their societies. Indeed, those who sought to deviate from Washington’s strategic dictates often faced severe political consequences, and in some cases violent ends. To suggest that Western subordination to the United States is a novelty introduced by Trump is therefore simply false. Equally misleading is Carney’s off-hand invocation of the supposedly self-evident reality of “great-power rivalry”. At first glance, this may appear to be a neutral or even realistic assessment. In fact, it masks a deeply West-centric worldview, one in which the current global disorder is not the product of a single dominant actor, namely the United States, but of multiple powers allegedly competing for global hegemony, particularly China and Russia. This framing places all major powers on the same moral and strategic plane. But it is fundamentally false. Neither China nor Russia is seeking to replace the United States as a global hegemon. Rather, both are advocating a different international configuration: one in which states are permitted to pursue their own development paths and safeguard their core security interests without facing economic warfare, political subversion or military coercion. The instability generated by this transition does not arise because such demands are unreasonable, but because Washington has proven unable to accept them — recasting multipolarity itself, or non-Western development, as an existential threat. By adopting the language of “great-power rivalry”, Carney obscures this asymmetry and, in doing so, reinforces the very premise underpinning the aggressive US unilateralism he claims to oppose. One might argue that expecting greater candour from someone like Carney is naïve, and that the real value of his speech lies in having pushed open the Overton window. But this is not merely a question of historical accuracy. It directly shapes the kind of alternative order that figures like Carney can be expected to construct. Simply put, when someone like Carney speaks of sovereignty and autonomy, their claims cannot be taken at face value. Carney’s record speaks for itself. He is a quintessential representative of international finance capital: a former Goldman Sachs executive, former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England. He returned to Canada to take the helm of a Liberal Party that won its most recent election on a nationalist platform promising “independence” from Trump’s demands. Yet leaders of this class have never shown genuine concern for national sovereignty. On the contrary, globalist technocrats like Carney have spent their careers actively eroding it — subordinating democratic control, economic policy and strategic autonomy to the imperatives of transnational capital. In this light, it is particularly revealing that Carney used his speech to reaffirm Canada’s commitment both to NATO and to the proxy war in Ukraine. ... How can one credibly claim to seek “independence” from the United States while remaining firmly embedded in NATO — the primary instrument through which Washington has long militarily subordinated its Western “allies” — and while actively supporting a proxy war that has been the central driver of Europe’s economic degradation and geopolitical hyper-vassalisation? How can decades of provocations along Russia’s borders, the transformation of Ukraine into a Western proxy, the destruction of the country itself and the massive bloodshed of the past nearly four years be presented as a shining example of “value-based foreign policy”? Carney further reinforces this logic by implicitly endorsing the premise that Europe must urgently bolster its defences — against Russia, of course, which is implicitly assumed to constitute an existential threat. “Can Europe defend itself without the US? Unequivocally, yes”, Carney asserted, without questioning the strategic framework that made such dependence appear necessary in the first place. The same logic applies — if anything, even more starkly — to European leaders themselves. Like Canada, and often to a far greater extent, they have supported and actively participated in virtually every US post-Cold War imperial intervention, most of them illegal — from the destruction of Iraq and Libya to the sponsorship of mass violence in Gaza, and all the way to Trump’s blatantly illegal attack on Venezuela. Against this record, their sudden appeals to international law and to “upholding the principles of the UN Charter, including sovereignty, territorial integrity and the inviolability of borders” in response to threats against Greenland are grotesquely hypocritical. ... Europe’s indignant reaction to Trump’s bullying is rendered even more absurd by the fact that these are the same leaders who, in recent years — well before Trump’s second term — have consistently acted against their own countries’ core interests across virtually every major domain: trade, energy, security. Time and again, European governments have subordinated themselves to Washington’s strategic agenda, or outright diktats, with the result that Europe today is more politically, economically and militarily vassalised to the US — and therefore weaker and less autonomous — than at any point since the Second World War. ... And yet, despite all this, European elites continue to indulge in a “Year Zero” narrative, perhaps best captured by this lament from an unnamed EU official: “Our American Dream is dead. Donald Trump killed it”. The implication is that Europe’s loss of autonomy is a recent aberration, rather than the culmination of decades of voluntary subordination. This renders current European talk of “independence” and “strategic autonomy” — along with their theatrical outrage at Trump — utterly hollow. Especially when one considers that, much like Canada, Europe’s actual response has been to double down on NATO: an institution effectively controlled by the US, whose core function has always been to ensure Europe’s strategic dependence on Washington, and to intensify its commitment to the proxy war against Russia. ... This reality becomes even clearer when one examines the ongoing evolution of NATO planning and command structures in Europe. ... Greenland is the most obvious illustration of the growing chasm between European rhetoric and material reality. Publicly, European leaders posture as defenders of Denmark’s sovereignty, condemning Trump’s annexationist threats as violations of international law. In practice, however, they have already moved to militarise Greenland — and the Arctic more broadly — within the framework of NATO. This was made explicit by NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte at Davos: “President Trump and other leaders are right. We have to do more there. We have to protect the Arctic against Russian and Chinese influence”. This stance is presented as an alternative response to Trump’s threats. In reality, it amounts to a capitulation to them: Greenland is effectively being placed under US control via NATO. Ironically, this is a textbook example of the very “performative sovereignty” Carney himself decried — a posture that speaks the language of autonomy while fully accepting the material fact of subordination through integrated NATO command structures, US-controlled critical infrastructure and Western financial architectures. ... Having said all this, what conclusions can we draw about the “new world order” envisioned by Carney — and seemingly endorsed by large sections of the European political elite? ... What Carney and his European counterparts object to is not coercion as such, but Trump’s tactical style. They view Trump’s overt, “mask-off” unilateralism as damaging not to their countries’ sovereignty — which they have long undermined and continue to undermine — but to what might be described as the general interests of Western capital. It is these interests that Carney represents, along with the broader Davos milieu in which his speech was delivered, as opposed to the narrower, more factional capitalist interests embodied by Trump. Ultimately, Carney’s speech does signal a real fracture within the Western bloc, but it is not one that pits European or Canadian interests against American ones. Rather, they reflect conflicts between different factions of Western capital, including within the United States itself. The “new world order” favoured by these interests would, in practice, closely resemble the old rules-based order: one in which multipolarity is managed and constrained through a coordinated Western strategy that combines selective engagement with rising powers — transactional and rhetorical openness to some, first and foremost China, but not to others, such as Russia — while safeguarding the collective interests of Western capital through economic coercion, military expansion and the familiar language of “values”. Read the full article here: thomasfazi.com/p/davos-carne…

They don’t hate Trump because he uses military violence against the Untermenschen — something German and other Europea elites fully support (see Gaza). They hate him because he’s demolishing the myth or fiction of the “rules-based order”, where you’re expected to cloak imperialist and neocolonial violence in liberal niceties.