If you missed it, the end of the United States as a superpower that leads the free world was declared out loud yesterday at Davos, by the prime minister of Canada, Mark Carney, who is more brilliant than any leader the US can likely hope to have for a very long time. He declared it not with a bang, though it was received thusly by those who understood the gravity of what he was saying, and considering the standing ovation he got at the end, guess they thought it was a banger.
It wasn’t a whimper, either, though. Just a straightforward declaration of The Way Things Are. Not the way things might be if the US keeps fucking around. The way they are. And the way they are is that the old order has passed, it’s over. Not “let’s see what happens in the midterms,” not “hopefully AOC will be president in 2028.” Over.
Before the election, France’s Europe minister said that “We cannot leave the security of Europe in the hands of voters in Wisconsin every four years.” Or as Jonathan V. Last wrote in the Bulwark yesterday, before Carney’s speech happened, “Europe must consider any pause in America’s attempt to annex Greenland as temporary and subject to renewal whenever 40,000 Wisconsinites are aggrieved about the price of eggs.”
Carney’s speech is all of that, delivered with a matter-of-fact shrug. The US is no longer the leader of the free world. It’s a great power competing with other great powers for the spoils of the entire planet. Meanwhile, “the middle powers” — like Canada — “must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”
He received a standing ovation for his speech, which will be in the history books.
Other things that happened at Davos yesterday: Commerce Secretary Howard Nutlick, the thirstiest cum-catcher in the entire regime, cemented his lifelong humiliation by trying to snake-oil the serious people there on the dementia-fied notion that clean energy is a bad idea — Al Gore reportedly booed him — and refused to say that the US invading and stealing Greenland, for strategic Donald Trump Is The New Hitler And I Love Him For That purposes, is not a good idea. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent also prissed around and called Denmark “irrelevant,” bitched and moaned about French President Emmanuel Macron saying that Europeans preferred “respect to bullies” and “the rule of law to brutality.” That’s when common gentleman farmer Bessent wasn’t babbling weird shit about normal, regular Boomers owning “five, 10, or 12” houses for their retirement.
Oh yes, and he warned European leaders not to retaliate against whatever tariffs Donald Trump wants to dementia-rape them with next, we guess because Hitler’s new regime prefers it when people say “thank you.”
Other things that happened in Europe yesterday: A Danish MP literally said the words “Mr. President, FUCK OFF,” in a speech directed at Donald Trump. Also, a German politician became the first that we’ve seen, at least during these few news cycles, to suggest that maybe his country should boycott the World Cup. Keep an eye on that.
But back to that Carney speech. Because he said a lot of words too. He didn’t say Donald Trump’s name, though. He didn’t need to. What he said was calmly, straightforwardly earthshaking enough as it was.
It was full of these declarations of The Way Things Are: “Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships.”
It was a brutally blunt assessment of the The Way Things Were:
“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 rigor, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
“This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
“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.”
Vs. The Way Things Are Now:
“This bargain no longer works.
“Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
And:
“Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.”
And:
“You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.”
And:
“When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.”
And:
“Stop invoking the rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised.”
And finally:
“We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine cooperation.
“The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home, and to act together.”
And so much more in between.
We feel like the divide in American politics these days — especially in the Democratic Party and on the Left, largely about Democrats who don’t understand/can’t accept/emotionally process that we’re never going back to the way things were, vs. those grownups who do.
Full speech and transcript after the jump.
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