When Canadian Prime Minister, Mark Carney, took to the podium at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos on 20 January, he probably did not know that his 17-minute speech would electrify not just the audience present in the room (who rewarded him with a standing ovation), but also international newsrooms and op-ed desks far away.It is now being hailed as a landmark declaration of a ‘new world order’. One academic has called it a “moment of global clarity”. For former US President Jimmy Carter’s speechwriter, it was a “speech for the history books.” One noted Canadian journalist has already christened it the “Carney doctrine.”To be clear, Carney did pull off a rare polemical stunt for a Western leader. A Canadian prime minister openly calling out “American hegemony” is no small event in geopolitical history. Neither is his forceful and eloquent dismissal of the existing international system as a “pleasant fiction”.Carney’s basic thesis was that there is a “rupture in the world order”. With great powers waving their sticks around, he called on middle powers to come together to take the lead.But, is the so-called “Carney doctrine” really a radical proposition? Is it even novel in its content and scope, something unheard of so far?The truth is that Carney’s speech reads somewhat differently from the southern hemisphere. Far from exceptional, it comes across as trite, self-centred and rather, historically naive. To understand how, we must ask two questions about Carney’s speech: when and who?When: shadows of our timesCarney’s speech did not emerge out of a vacuum, and must be squared against the tides of our times. In doing so, we may be able to parse the subtext and amplify the silences of his remarks. Three aspects of the timing are crucial here.One, the Canadian prime minister delivered his sermon under the long and dark shadows of US President Donald Trump’s Greenland campaign. Trump has now made ‘reclaiming’ the Danish-owned icy territory his pet project. To do so, he has gone on an unprecedented and bizarre salvo against his own strategic allies in Europe, nearly threatening a war against NATO, of which the US itself is the most powerful member.Needless to say, this has caused great pain across western European capitals and in Canada, another key NATO member state. Add to this the barrage of incremental tariffs that Trump has slapped on Canadian goods in recent months, sparking a never-before-seen North American trade war. Naturally, Ottawa feels slighted and humiliated.It is important to contextualise Carney’s remarks in this emotive bilateral dynamic and in Trump’s anti-European onslaught that threatens to derail the whole gamut of transatlantic relations – which the Canadian leader mentions explicitly towards the end.One is then inclined to believe that what he said was largely provoked by the mischief and impudence of a long-time Western ally, not a sudden or organic reckoning about a broken world order. In fact, a lot of what Carney said was specifically meant for the US president’s ears, and one is then tempted to see it as the theatrical expression of all but a little, though consequential, North American feud.Two, Carney’s lecture dropped less than three weeks after the US invaded Venezuela and detained its democratically-elected President, Nicolas Maduro. The Canadian prime minister’s response then was to welcome the forced regime change operation as an “opportunity for freedom, democracy, peace, and prosperity for the Venezuelan people.”There was no condemnation of what was essentially a gross violation of international law and Venezuelan sovereignty. Weeks later, he shows up at a global forum and lectures the world about how “the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.” How are we to buy this non-sequitur of an event with a straight face?Three, Carney’s remorseful rhetoric about the fraying world order coincides with an ongoing genocide in Gaza. Yet, there was not even a whisper of the words ‘Gaza’ or ‘Palestine’ in his speech. He generously (and conveniently) recalled Czech resistance to Soviet rule from five decades ago, but could not invoke even a small anecdote of contemporary Palestinian resistance against Israeli occupation.Can a world leader today talk about how “international law [is] applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim” without invoking Palestine, the ultimate metaphor in modern history for the racially stratified application of international law? Should we be taking them seriously if they do?Who: the (white) manCarney’s diagnosis about the world order and his proposed course of treatment may appear new, but are not. What the Canadian Prime Minister said at Davos are exactly what ‘Third World’ leaders have been saying for decades now – that the international system is rigged, that weaker powers need to join forces to protect their own interests, and ‘values’ must be backed with ‘interests’ in diplomacy.For these countries, a ‘rupture in the world order’ that Carney spoke about came at least twice – once after the end of the Second World War that unveiled an era of bipolar great power competition and then at the end of the Cold War that replaced the old order with a new unipolar, American epoch.Each time, the ‘Third World’ had to confront a reconfigured global chessboard that dramatically reduced its strategic legroom and forced it to make new choices for its own benefit and dignity.Nostalgia surely is not a strategy, as the Canadian PM bluntly put it, and the ‘Third World’ knows that very well. In facing the brutal headwinds of geopolitics, thus, the non-West has taught itself to continuously realign and recalibrate by finding, in Carney’s language, a “third path for impact.”Sample these words by the first Indian Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, from a speech to the Indian Parliament on 25 February 1955:Every country has the right to choose its own path and go along it. We have chosen our own path and we propose to go along it, and to vary it as and when we choose, not at somebody’s dictate or pressure; and we are not afraid of any other country imposing its will upon us by military methods or any other methods. The only way for us is to build our own strength, which we intend doing.The ‘Carney doctrine’, in that sense, has been the senso commune – common sense, in Gramscian terms – for the non-West through most part of modern history. Now, faced with a delinquent and irreconcilable ally, the North is finally beginning to see from the South.In doing so, it may soon realise that a whole host of countries across Asia, Africa and South America have long been pursuing what Carney, citing the Finnish President, Alexander Stubb, called “value-based realism”. Most of the ‘Third World’ already knows from memory and experience that a purely values-based foreign policy is only for the powerful and privileged; that the weak cannot afford to ignore their ‘interests’.Not just that, leaders across large parts of the ‘Third World’, forged in the fires of colonial oppression and indifference, have learnt to weld values and interests in meaningful, principled and rather, sophisticated ways. They have spoken up against injustice and inequality while pursuing their strategic interests.For instance, long before Carney, the likes of Muammar Gaddafi and Yasser Arafat took to global podiums to boldly called out the farce of the international order, while also appealing for global parity, justice and peace. They articulately exposed how a small group of strong countries banded together at various forums, including the UN Security Council, to sanction and bankroll oppressive wars against the weak.But, while the likes of Gaddafi and Arafat are either sidelined or violently repudiated in global history for their ‘violent radicalism’ and ‘thuggish recalcitrance’, a Carney or an Obama is promptly lauded and lionised for asserting the same avant-garde ideas in formal business attire.What ‘middle power’?Carney repeatedly called on ‘middle powers’ to “act together” in response to the shifting tides of geopolitics. He did so using a collective “we”. But, is there really a “we” here? Can Carney – representing a North American, White-majority country – speak for the whole gamut of ‘middle powers’ across the entire world?What is a ‘middle power’ even? The World Economic Forum, which organises the annual Davos gala, itself isn’t clear about it – as one of its whitepapers from 2024 reveals. Sure, we may use a whole set of economic, political and military metrics to objectively identify and classify middle powers.But, would such classifications account for the racialised histories of colonial domination and postcolonial capital accumulation that clearly separate Euro-American countries from their non-Western counterparts? Despite comparable military or economic parameters, can a Canada, for example, be placed at par with a Kenya, Indonesia or Brazil?By using a blanket ‘we’, Carney seeks to disingenuously flatten a deeply stratified global history. His call for a global ‘middle power’ collective is a deceptive attempt to throw a veil over Canada’s own colonial past and postcolonial excesses, such as its direct participation in America’s bloody War on Terror in Afghanistan and military support for the Zionist occupation in Palestine.The truth is there has never been a “we” in global politics. Every country speaks from a distinct historical position and hence, carries different moral burdens. They have had unique experiences with international institutions, which have often favoured Western interests and sensibilities over non-Western ones.So, before we fawn over the so-called ‘Carney doctrine’, we must remember that he represents a country that is implicated in the construction of the same unjust world order that he so gracefully punctured at Davos. We must remember that it requires historically accumulated privilege and power to build such a system, and an equal amount of historically accumulated privilege and power to resist that same system.“This is Canada’s path” – is how Carney concluded his speech. It is perhaps the only honest, reflexive declaration in his speech. Indeed, his is an exclusive path. Others may enter it, but not without conditions and consequences.Angshuman Choudhury is a joint doctoral candidate in Comparative Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore and King’s College London.This article first appeared on the author’s Substack, Barbed Wires, and has been republished with permisison.