Canadian PM to World Leaders: You’re Either at the Table—or on the Menu

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney warned global leaders this week that countries outside the room where power is negotiated risk becoming targets of it; in a world of intensifying great-power rivalry, he said, those not “at the table” may find themselves “on the menu.”

Carney delivered the message Tuesday at the World Economic Forum in Davos, framing the international system as having shifted beyond a period of transition into what he called a rupture. The global rules-based order, he suggested, is no longer functioning as it claims to function—particularly for countries that once relied on multilateral institutions, trade rules and international law to constrain the behaviour of the most powerful states.

His core argument was that many governments and corporations have continued to speak and act as though the old system still operates, even while privately acknowledging its erosion. The result, he implied, is a form of collective self-deception that allows power politics to expand unchecked.

To illustrate the point, Carney invoked the late Czech dissident and president Václav Havel, referencing Havel’s well-known essay The Power of the Powerless. In that essay, Havel describes a shopkeeper who displays a political slogan he does not believe simply to avoid trouble and signal compliance. When everyone performs belief in a system they privately know to be false, Havel argued, the system sustains itself through ritual and conformity rather than truth.

Carney adapted the analogy to international affairs: countries, he said, have for decades placed their own “signs in the window” by repeating the language of a rules-based order while overlooking its exceptions, hypocrisies and selective enforcement. That arrangement, he argued, is now collapsing.

For years, Carney noted, the fiction was still useful. Even when enforcement was uneven, and even when powerful countries exempted themselves, American dominance helped provide global public goods—a security umbrella, open sea lanes, financial stability and dispute-resolution mechanisms. Those benefits, he suggested, allowed many governments to pursue values-driven policy while assuming that a wider architecture would preserve order.

But the bargain, he said, no longer works.

Carney’s speech came amid growing global anxiety about the United States’ increasingly transactional posture toward allies and institutions—an approach that includes the use of tariffs and economic threats as geopolitical leverage, and a demonstrated willingness to bypass or disregard international norms when they restrict U.S. objectives.

In the days leading up to the Davos meeting, U.S. pressure regarding Greenland again drew international attention, with Greenland’s strategic location and Arctic resources increasingly treated as a bargaining chip in broader security competition. Carney positioned Canada firmly in support of Greenland and Denmark’s right to determine Greenland’s future, while warning against the use of tariffs as a threat tied to Arctic geopolitics.