Mark Carney: The New Leader of the Western World Who Captured Davos!

 

Mark Carney: The New Leader of the Western World Who Conquered Davos

Written by Justine Frangouli-Argyris

They say that no adviser or speechwriter assisted the Canadian prime minister in crafting the address that left the global audience stunned, as he drew on Thucydides (Carney is known to be an admirer of antiquity) and a simple human allegory to demonstrate that “everything flows, everything changes, nothing remains.”

The Canadian prime minister’s speech in Davos was not yet another technocratic intervention on the global economy; it was a public diagnosis of crisis, delivered in a tone that resembled a warning more than an analysis. Mark Carney described a world in which rules have eroded, institutions have weakened, and the international order functions more as a backdrop than as a reality. His statement that “the old order is not coming back” was not merely an observation about our era; it was a direct denunciation of the unilateral power exercised by certain major countries, as international reports noted.

His critique, though he named no one, clearly targeted the policies associated with American leadership in recent years. The weaponization of economic interdependence, the devaluation of international agreements, the logic of power over cooperation — all these formed the underlying axis of his speech. His reference to the Greenland episode, which he used as an example of arbitrariness, served as a symbol of an era in which geopolitical behavior is no longer constrained by rules but by the will of powerful countries.

The sharpness of his speech did not lie in individual phrases but in its overall architecture: he presented a world where destabilization is not accidental but the result of deliberate choices. And he called on the “middle powers” to stop acting as passive observers and to assume an active role in shaping a new, more stable international reality.

Carney’s intervention in Davos was, essentially, a warning: that the age of arbitrariness carries a cost, that the abolition of rules is not an abstract notion but a threat to global security, and that the international community can no longer rely on an order that has ceased to function. In this sense, Carney’s speech was sharp not because he attacked anyone, but because he described with precision a reality many avoid saying aloud.

Although Carney did not name Trump, the severity of his speech was unprecedented:
• He spoke of “weapons of economic integration”
• Of the “death of the international order”
• Of “rupture” rather than “transition”
• Of “hypothetical rules” that no longer apply

The target of these phrases is clear: the Trump-era approach is viewed by the Canadian prime minister as a key factor in destabilizing the global order.

Carney appeared as a leader calling for unity in the face of an era of arbitrariness, unilateralism, and the dismantling of rules — an era which, in his analysis, has been accelerated by the choices of the American command, behaving imperially in ways reminiscent of kings and emperors.