"Mark Carney’s Davos speech is eloquent, polished, and intellectually seductive. It borrows the moral authority of Václav Havel, the language of honesty, and the cadence of realism to present itself as a clear-eyed response to a collapsing world order. It will likely be quoted, praised, and taught. That alone makes it important to challenge, because beneath its rhetoric sits a dangerous misreading of the moment we are in.
The speech begins from a premise that is only partially true: that the rules-based international order is fading, that great powers increasingly act without constraint, and that middle powers must therefore reorient themselves away from traditional alignments toward flexible, issue-by-issue coalitions. What Carney gets wrong is not the diagnosis of instability, but the conclusion he draws from it. We are not entering a post-alignment world. We are entering a pre-conflict one.
If we are indeed living through a Fourth Turning (Neil Howe, suggested reading) then this is not a period for elegant repositioning or moralised hedging. It is a period in which power consolidates, blocs harden, and ambiguity becomes liability. History does not reward those who attempt to invent third paths between competing civilisational forces at moments of systemic stress. It overwhelms them.
Carney presents “middle power solidarity” as a way to escape subordination, but solidarity without anchoring is not neutrality. It is drift. When he speaks of diversification, variable geometry, and broad engagement, he is describing a dilution of deterrence at the exact moment deterrence matters most. He frames American pressure as coercive and outdated, while treating Chinese power as simply another force to be balanced against. That is not honesty. It is selective realism.
China is not merely one great power among others. It is the primary enabler of Russia’s war economy, the dominant purchaser of sanctioned Iranian oil, the architect of debt leverage across the Global South, and the only state actively preparing for peer conflict with the West. To speak of it in the same breath as American transactionalism is to flatten moral and strategic distinctions that still matter profoundly. One system pressures allies within a framework of shared institutions, transparency, and reversibility. The other uses opacity, dependency, and retaliation. Treating these as functionally equivalent is not principled. It is evasive.
The invocation of Havel is particularly misplaced. Havel wrote about compliance with an authoritarian lie, sustained through ritualised participation. Carney repurposes that metaphor to argue against continued alignment with a liberal democratic alliance that, however flawed, still underwrites global security. NATO, Five Eyes, and the US alliance system are not shop-window slogans. They are the scaffolding that prevents escalation. Removing the sign in this context does not expose a lie. It removes cover. And when cover is removed during a systemic crisis, the result is not liberation but exposure.
Strategic autonomy is presented as the answer, but autonomy is not alignment-neutral. Energy independence, industrial capacity, and defence investment are necessary, but without a clear civilisational anchor they do not deter conflict. In a world where war is already being fought across domains - Ukraine, the Red Sea, cyberspace, space, supply chains - autonomy without alignment does not create sovereignty. It creates vulnerability.
Carney insists this is not about choosing China over the United States, yet the signal is unmistakable. American leverage is framed as something to be resisted. Western institutions are described as diminished. Strategic partnerships with China are announced as proof of independence. A “third path” is marketed at the precise moment Western cohesion is most critical. If you tell the world you are no longer anchored, the strongest current decides where you drift. And in the present system, that current runs east.
This is not living in truth. It is premature post-Americanism dressed as realism. The timing is the fatal flaw. If delivered in a world where a stable multipolar equilibrium had already emerged, it might be visionary. Delivered now, it is reckless. The United States is not a fading empire clinging to illusions. It remains the central pillar preventing rapid escalation into great power war. Undermining that pillar in the name of moral symmetry does not create justice or stability. It accelerates collapse.
Nostalgia is not a strategy, as Carney rightly says. But neither is pretending that power vacuums remain empty, or that middle powers can outflank history through rhetoric alone. This is not a moment for poetic realism or philosophical distancing. It is a moment for hard alignment.
Criticise America where necessary. Pressure it. Reform the system with it. But do not quietly prepare for a post-American world while China is actively preparing for a post-Western one. That is not honesty. It is abdication. And history has never been kind to those who mistook eloquence for strategy at the edge of rupture."
This opinion column is written by Jeff Wilton-Love, one of our new vice presidents and a former county councillor.
