Understanding Carney at Davos

I’m pushed for time but want to get this out today. I see Sunday as offering the best chance of the two videos it hosts being viewed.

Tuesday’s speech at Davos by Canadian prime minister Mark Carney has generated a tsunami of media comment. This from a next day piece – ‘We are on the menu’: Why Carney upended US-led world order at Davos – by Middle East Eye’s Washington correspondent, Yasmine El-Sabawi:

It was likely the most resonant speech given by a Canadian prime minister on a global stage in decades. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former central banker who had never run for political office until April of last year, pointedly declared on Tuesday that the liberalism long-adopted by the West is no longer viable in an environment where US President Donald Trump is unilaterally calling the shots.

“It’s rare for me to receive a link to a world leader’s speech by diplomats from all over the world telling me, have I seen this yet? So I think it’s absolutely accurate to characterise it as a bit stunning”, Maya Ungar, an analyst at the International Crisis Group, told Middle East Eye.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Carney said Canada, along with other “middle powers”, must chart a new path.

“For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order”, he told a crowd filled with the top echelons of government and finance. “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 varied rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

“So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality. This bargain no longer works.”

She goes on:

… the admission was stunning, but many saw the irony of a G7 country now lamenting the loss of its privilege after benefiting for decades from a system that kept the Global South at arm’s length from the economic and social security of the liberal rules-based order.

I agree with both conclusions: on the one hand the pot-kettle-black nature of this lament by the archdeacon of neoliberalism who with extreme prejudice pursued oligarch-friendly policies at the Bank of England, on the other the shock effect of his words.

Shock effect or seismic rupture? The dust has yet to settle. I’m holding fire but Rachel Maddows is a highly able communicator, and liberal critic of Trumpian republicanism. As such she has the limited understanding of those who, whether friend or foe, see the 47th POTUS as a thing quite new while ignoring the reality that, beneath the noise generated by the pretence that America is a democracy, its post 1990 policy, foreign and economic especially, shows high continuity.

She is in no doubt that shock will  translate to rupture. Such is the depth of the crisis for the US ruling class, and extent of panic engendered thereof, I don’t rule out that not only has Trump hugely overplayed  his hand – when we all know his ability to declare he cleaned out the casino while slinking from the tables with pockets emptied – but, more momentously, the US itself has been badly damaged. Either way her polished theatrics and remarkable specificity make this, should you choose, one of the more exciting twenty-seven minutes you’re likely to spend today.

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Still with Carney, albeit with less heat and more light, my other video hosts political economist and global south debt specialist Michael Hudson. Of the many first rate commentators featured on this site, if I was pressed to name the two I see as offering the most reliable grounding in geopolitical realities, he’d be one. The other, Brian Berletic, has yet to respond specifically to Carney’s speech at Davos, while Michael does so only in passing; at the 28:06 mark of his 54:52 interview with market analyst and shrewd observer of the geopolitical scene, Lena Petrova.

But Carney’s high octane speech – coordinated, says Rachel Maddows, with the other junior imperialisms “medium nations” at Davos – can no more be understood in isolation than can those other remarkable events which have made January 2026, with a week still to go, a perfect expression of Lenin’s remark that there are decades when little happens; weeks when decades happen.

And no one, with the possible exception of Brian Berletic – an apples and oranges comparison – has done more to set out the framework without which Carney’s speech, Maduro’s abduction, Trump’s climb downs on Greenland and Iran and much besides can be adequately understood; not even with the input of commentators as ears-to-the-ground informed as Ms Meadows.

She speaks Beltway. He does global.

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