Why leaving the ‘rules-based order’ is harder than Carney thinks
Sid Shniad
Canadian Dimension January 22, 2026
Why leaving the ‘rules-based order’ is harder than Carney thinks
Does Carney’s speech mark a dramatic change in direction in Canadian foreign policy or merely a shift in rhetoric?
Paul Robinson
Mark Carney at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2026 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, January 20, 2026. Photo by Ciaran McCrickard/Flickr.
In the current paranoid atmosphere, it would not be surprising if some people aren’t wondering if Mark Carney is a Russian agent. For in his speech in Davos on Tuesday, the Canadian prime minister made remarks that if uttered by the likes of me would have critics muttering about “Kremlin talking points.”
Senior Russian officials like President Vladmir Putin and Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov have long complained that Western states operate double standards, that their politicians are hypocrites, and that the so-called “rules-based international order” (always put in quotation marks) involves one set of rules for the West and another set of rules for everybody else.
It seems that Carney agrees. In his much-discussed speech at the World Economic Forum this week, he declared: “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying degrees of rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”
“This fiction was useful,” said Carney. Canada benefitted from it, and so, “we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works.”
American political scientist Richard Falk once described humanitarian intervention as being like the Mississippi river—“it flows in only one direction.” Falk wrote this in the 1990s, when politicians and philosophers in the West pushed the idea that state sovereignty was limited, and that states that abused human rights were, in essence, fair game for intervention by Western liberal democracies. Falk’s point was that a rule that allowed states to intervene in the affairs of other states was a rule that only the strong could put into practice. The weak were never going to intervene in the affairs of the strong. The rule flowed only in one way.
This perhaps explains why Western states were so keen on it. The end of the Cold War era put the Western world in a position of almost unrestricted military and financial power. The old rules that limited our ability to use that power stood in our way. And so, we found it convenient to invent new rules—“asymmetric” ones, as Carney puts it—that expanded our rights while limiting the rights of those weaker than us.
Sensible people, of course, long understood that this was breeding trouble down the line. But the arrogance of the moment meant that Western politicians didn’t heed the warnings. They were confident that rules that allowed the powerful to abuse their might could only ever be used by them and never against them. Now, though, the threatening behaviour of US President Donald Trump and the shifting balance of global power have led to the shocking revelation that this is no longer true—that the asymmetry of the “rules-based order” that we created might actually be used to harm us. It is this revelation that lies behind Carney’s speech and his warning that we must find another way.
In the 1990s Canada took the global lead in pressing “human security” and the idea that individual human rights trump state sovereignty. Now, Carney has dropped that language and is touting the importance of defending sovereignty. The rhetorical shift is quite dramatic.
This analysis bears traces both of Marxism and Realism, both of which tend to the view that rules serve the interests of the powerful. When power shifts, the rules shift too. This seems to be how Carney sees it. But while this may be part of what is going on, it’s not the only story.
In his speech, Carney quoted the late Czech dissident Vaclav Havel to compare states who touted the rules-based international order to shopkeepers in communist countries displaying signs saying “Workers of the World Unite!” They don’t believe in the slogan but say it anyway because it’s in their interests to do so. The implication is that Western states never actually believed in the rules-based international order. They just pretended to because, as Carney said, “the fiction was useful.”
But this is too cynical. While power dynamics undoubtedly made the rhetoric of the asymmetric rules-based order attractive, our politicians did not believe that it was all a lie. On the contrary, they believed in it, lock, stock, and barrel. The idea that what we call “the West” is exceptional—that is, the model for humanity that others must emulate—is deeply ingrained in the Western political psyche. So too is the conclusion that follows from it: that the West has the right to determine the rules of the international game, and to do so in ways that favour itself as the bearer of enlightenment. As Immanuel Kant put it, “Our part of the world will probably someday give laws to all of the others.”
Abandoning the asymmetry of the “rules-based order” is, therefore, not quite as simple as Carney implies. For doing so requires a fundamental rethinking of the entire basis of Western political identity. Some time in the future, perhaps, global power will have shifted so enormously that we might be forced to accept such a rethink. But we’re nowhere near there yet.
Indeed, it’s not clear that even Carney has really abandoned double standards and asymmetry. In his speech, he suggested that we can’t keep bending the rules of the game as a means of keeping on the good side of the Americans. Yet his government’s record suggests otherwise. For instance, Carney’s silence after the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was deafening. So too was his silence after the recent seizure of oil tankers on the high seas. If Carney is serious about ending double standards and hypocrisy in order to create a global system in which the same rules apply to all, then he needs to start acting much more consistently than he has to date.
One may wonder whether Carney’s speech marks a dramatic change in direction in Canadian foreign policy or merely a shift in rhetoric. The attitudes that lead to the problems the prime minister identified are deeply rooted in Western society. And over the years, powerful institutions have developed that work to ensure that these attitudes remain dominant. That said, rhetoric does matter. The ship of state turns very slowly. But it could just be that this is the nudge that is needed to start it turning. For that reason, Carney’s speech is decidedly welcome. And if nothing else, we can at least expect the phrase “rules-based international order” to disappear from the lexicon of the Canadian foreign policy establishment. Not a moment too soon.
Paul Robinson is a professor in the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs at the University of Ottawa and a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Peace and Diplomacy. He is the author of numerous works on Russian and Soviet history, including Russian Conservatism, published by Northern Illinois University Press in 2019.