Carney says 'we are in the midst of a rupture not transition' at WEF

Carney says 'we are in the midst of a rupture not transition' at WEF

Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney gestures as he speaks during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos on January 20, 2026. The World Economic Forum takes place in Davos from January 19 to January 23, 2026. Photograph: (AFP)

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Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney says the international rules-based order is “partially false” and in rupture, echoing long-standing Chinese and Russian calls for multipolarity amid trade and tariff wars.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney on Tuesday, January 20, said that the old World Order is in the “midst of a rupture”, his candid admission echoes the voices of the Chinese and Russian leaders who have been urging for multipolarity since the turn of the decade. He emphasised that the international rule-based order was “partially false”.

“We knew the story of the international rules-based world order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically,” said Carney.

The sentiment had been echoed by key Development theorists like Raul Prebisch and Andre Gunder Frank of the Dependency Paradigm. They said that underdevelopment is not because of a lack of integration into the world order, but because of colonial exploitation and unfair integration via neo-colonial terms of trade.

"Let me be direct, we are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition," said Carney. "Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics have laid bare risks of extreme global integration." "But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons," he said, clearly referring to Trump. "Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructures as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited. You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination."

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Trump and Carney playing "Good Cop and Bad Cop"?

However, a section of Chinese analysts believes that Donald Trump and Mark Carney are playing "Good Cop and Bad Cop" with China and its stake in multipolarity. Trump threatens to make Canada the 51st state, Carney pivots towards China and the Gulf to get $1T investment in return for the toxic assets in Canada, thus opening up the Chinese market at the same time pretend to stand up to US hegemony. All the assets in the US and Canada are unsustainably overvalued, and they require a constant flow of capital to sustain their value. So Mark Carney, since October, has visited the UAE, Qatar, and China, among many other foreign trips, securing investment for the inflated assets in Canada. This had been supported by the Trump administration despite his overt admission of the changing world order. Carney had a background at Goldman Sachs and led the UK in Brexit; he had been praised by Trump ever since his election.

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Kushal Deb is a mid-career journalist with seven years of experience and a strong academic background. Passionate about research, storytelling, writes about economics, policy, cult...Read More