Por Ray Acheson
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| YouTube screenshot. |
But missing from the Prime Minister’s speech was an honest reflection of the contribution of Canada and other “middle powers” to the destruction of international law, violation of human rights, and global inequality. These governments fucked around and now they’re finding out. They emboldened the United States to get where it is today, supporting and enabling it for so long because it suited their interests. Many “middle powers” also colonized other countries, extracted wealth, resources, and labour from the Global South, and overthrew democatically elected leaders in those countries in favour of those willing to serve the imperial core.
Now these same “middle powers” are finding out what it might mean to be on the other side of this equation. To be the ones under threat of having economic integration weaponized against them, of having tariffs imposed on them, of having their governments overthrown and their countries invaded and occupied.
Acknowledging their own crimes and privileges is essential if the governments of these countries are going to build meaningful, lasting coalitions that actually protect people and the planet, and not just serve their own short-term self-interests. If the “middle powers” don’t want to experience what they have done to others, these countries need to get serious about building alternatives with the leadership of the Global South and the populations who have been harmed by their past actions.
Acknowledging reality as a “radical act”
The core admission of Carney’s speech, highlighting the sham of the rules-based order, is a good place to start. “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false,” he said. “That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient. That trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.”
He said this fiction was useful (he left out for whom—it was useful for imperialist countries like Canada), but that it no longer works. Instead of pretending the rules-based order functions as advertised, Carney urged states to “call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as a weapon of coercion.”
Proclaiming that the world is facing a rupture, he pointed out that the “great powers” are using economic integration as weapons and tools of subordination. In banker-speak, he urged countries to “diversify” their alliances, make “collective investments in resilience,” and to embrace “values-based realism”. He announced that Canada will be pursuing “different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests.” He specifically urged so-called middle power countries to band together, noting that “if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.” Most importantly, he said these states must act consistently, “applying the same standards to allies and rivals.”
As important as this admission and the calls for coalition building are, underneath the jargon is a pitch for countries to double down on capitalism, resource extraction, free trade, artificial intelligence, and militarism. This is a call to fortify neoliberalism under the guise of countering fascism—even though these choices are what has led to the imperialist international order Carney is claiming to oppose.
Embedded militarism
Let’s start with militarism. Carney affirmed at Davos that he will be doubling Canada’s military spending by the end of the decade. Last year, he announced a military budget of $81.8 billion CAD (~59.1 billion USD) over the next five years. While advising countries at Davos against “building fortresses,” it seems his government is investing in just that. Not that doubling the military budget would be enough to deter a US invasion; the Canadian military recently modeled a response to the US attack on Canada, in which it predicted that US forces would overwhelm “strategic assets” with “lightning speed”. The Canadian military said it would have to rely on unconventional warfare modelled after the Muhajideen in Afghanistan, as well as guerrilla fighting from armed civilians. It assumes the fighting would last for decades.
What Carney also didn’t mention at Davos is the fact that the Canadian military and intelligence services are deeply entwined with the United States. There are US troops stationed in Canada at North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) bases. Canada is part of the Five Eyes alliance, an intelligence-sharing coalition made up of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Then of course there is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which the Trump regime has been overtly hostile towards but which in the past has done plenty of US bidding in terms of bombing other countries, hosting US nuclear weapons, engaging in war games, ratcheting up tensions with Russia, and spending more and more taxpayer dollars on weapons and war (all members but Spain recently agreed to spend 5% of their gross domestic product on militarism).
Like Canada, the rest of NATO has been throughly militarised by the United States. The US has troops stationed in at least 38 military bases across Europe. It has about 100 nuclear weapons stationed across five of these. This makes European posturing around not wanting to cede European territory to the US a bit ironic, as large swaths of European land already belongs to the United States.
Canada and European NATO members are also deeply invested in US weapon companies. Canada hosts manufacturing plants for Boeing, General Dynamics, Lockheed Martin, and more. Canada’s military buys billions of dollars’ worth of weapons from the United States and continues to do so. Canada is a key partner in the US F-35 joint strike fighter jet program, which is one of the weapon systems that Canada has been supplying Israel with parts and components for its genocide of Palestinians. The same is true of many European NATO members and other “middle powers”.
Canada’s complicity and crimes
All of this entanglement brings us to the importance of acknowledging one’s role in bringing the current situation to bear. If Carney is serious about building new alliances based on trust and equality, he should acknowledge that Canada, under his leadership and past administrations, was not a passive observer in the fiction of the rules-based order. Canada did not just “hang a sign in the window,” as suggested in his speech. Canada was an active participant in breaking international law for economic gain, for enforcing rules asymmetrically to privilege itself and allies.
For example, the Canadian government helped the United States invade and occupy Afghanistan; it pretended not to support the invasion of Iraq while aiding and abetting it; it helped launch a coup in Haiti; and it has helped overthrow governments and destabilise societies in Latin America in locations where its companies own mines.
The destruction of international law didn’t just come from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the US invasion of Venezuela, or threats about Greenland. Canada has been a full and active partner in refusing to play by the rules in helped established. No more so than in its continued arming of Israel. Canada has been a consistent partner for Israel in its genocide of Palestinians, in violation of the Genocide Convention, the Geneva Conventions, the Arms Trade Treaty, and more.
The Canadian government has also violently repressed any opposition to its complicity in genocide. Police cleared student encampments at universities, arrested activists for criticising Israel online, criminalised solidarity actions and marches, executed no-knock nighttime raids on the homes of activists accused of property damage of complicit institutions, and pre-dawn raids on others who allegedly organised blockades of weapon factories.
At Davos, Carney talked a big game of Canada being “a pluralistic society that works,” where its “public square is loud, diverse and free.” In reality, the public square is becoming smaller and more criminalised. It’s not just anti-genocide activists that are under threat. The Canadian government has repeatedly sent its most militarized police force, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), onto unceaded Indigenous lands to violently arrest First Nations organizers and activists for protecting land, water, and forests from fossil fuel extraction. The RCMP, whose precurser was formed to commit genocide in the early days of the settler state’s expansion, is now deployed by the federal government to protect the interests of fossil fuel companies.
This makes Carney’s bragging about Canada’s energy resources and critical minerals particularly concerning. Canada already extracts oil from the tar sands in Alberta—the dirtiest form of oil extraction in the world, for which Carney recently granted the far-right Alberta premier permission to build a new pipeline in what activists have called the “sellout of the century” and a “stunning betrayal of federal commitments on climate change and Indigenous rights.” Canada also extracts gas and coal from British Columbia, uranium from Saskatchewan, and much more. Carney’s celebration of environmentally devastating artificial intelligence, and of Canada’s status as an “energy superpower” and holder of “vast reserves of critical minerals,” is a dire warning about the future Carney envisons for Canadians, and for the planet. More extraction and mining, more use of energy, more human rights violations.
Canadian companies have a horrific human rights record at mining sites around the world. And Mining Watch Canada warns that “the manner in which the metal-intensive energy transition is advancing is fundamentally at odds with respect for global human rights.” It points out, “The critical minerals rush is rapidly encroaching on sensitive environments, imposing on Indigenous territories without consent, further endangering the lives of human rights and environmental defenders, and violating basic rights to health, clean air and water, and safety and security for local communities.”
If Carney is counting on more mining to save the Canadian economy, that will inevitably lead to more human rights violations, including in relation to freedom of speech. In addition to the violent repression of First Nations organizing, the Canadian government has also deported non-citizens for their climate activism. On that note, Canada is in the midst of an immigration crackdown. It has been deporting more than 400 people a week, mostly people seeking refugee and asylum status. The government says it intends to deport more people in 2026, even though it costs millions of dollars to do so. So much for Canada’s pluralistic society.
Building a new world order
All of this is to say, the “solutions” that Carney posits to aggressive US imperialism will still harm people, will still destroy ecology and exacerbate the climate crisis, will still maintain a rigid hierarchy in international relations that privileges some at the expense of others, and will still violate the human rights of activists, Indigenous Peoples, migrants, and more. This is not standing up to a bully; this is being one yourself.
Carney is right that the world needs global coalitions to prevent the Trump regime from crushing everyone it decides it dislikes or wants to own. Carney is also right that countries need to “diversify” their allies. But we need to go much further than his capitalist, extractivist imagination allows.
For one thing, Carney imagines the United States and other so-called great powers will go it alone. But this isn’t the plan, according to Trump’s own National Security Strategy. His regime is interested in teaming up with other authoritarian states to control “spheres of influence” and rule the world together. His preferred partners in crime are the gangster capitalists and the despotic megalomaniacs who are afraid of women and queer people, and think the world owes them. These partners don’t even need to all be white, which is particularly incredible when you realise that part of the reason he’s trashing his European allies is that their countries are no longer white enough for him. His new friends just have to have enough money and be repressive enough to play the game he wants to play.
These alliances of the worst of the worst are already forming, and anyone wanting to stand up to them needs to realize this. Because that also changes the calculation that Carney seems to be making that the “middle powers” just need to stick together, or form alliances with other economically powerful fascist states like China or India. In reality, the “middle powers” need to get over themselves, own up to their contributions to the destruction of international rules, norms, and law, and build coalitions with those they have harmed in the past. Not colonial relationships or patronizing, extractivist arrangements, but real partnerships.
There is no more time for Western domination. The “middle powers” need to learn from the countries that have experience with being oppressed by bully states. They need to figure out how to form equitable, reciprocal economic and security relationships that don’t rely on extraction, imperialism, militarism, and violence. Relationships that prioritize the well-being of all people, not just those in the imperial core, and that ensure the survival and health of the planet.
If Carney is willing to admit that the rules-based order was a sham, he need not seek to replicate it with other Western states, but to build real solidarity with the rest of the world. He needs to disentangle Canada from the US not just economically, but also militarily. And he needs to uphold the international law that he’s acknowledged the “middle powers” have only upheld partially.
Shifting language
He also needs to stop calling countries “great powers” and “middle powers”. We all do. These terms bestow upon certain governments a status they do not deserve. The US, Russia, Saudi Arabia, and others that the Trump regime wants to build an alliance of autocrats with are not great powers. They are heavily militarized states seeking global dominance through violence. They are bullies.
Canada, European countries, and other settler colonial states that claim Western status regardless of geography, like Australia and New Zealand, are not middle powers. They are countries that pillaged and plundered the Global South to build and maintain their economies at the expense of the vast majority of people and the planet. They are not in the middle; they are on the top, only now experiencing the full weight of what it means to be subordinated to a hierarchy imposed by those more violent than you.
Equality means getting rid of “great” and “middle” and the idea of “powers” at all, and telling things like they are. Power shouldn’t be about economic or military strength but about what people can do together in solidarity to better us all. Let this rupture be one that brings the world not to its knees at the boot of the violent bullies, but to build something that actually helps us all survive and thrive.
Ray Acheson (they/them) is Director of Reaching Critical Will, the disarmament program of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF). They provide analysis and advocacy at the United Nations and other international forums on matters of disarmament and demilitarization. Ray served on the steering group of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which won the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize for its work to ban nuclear weapons, and is also involved in organizing against autonomous weapons, the arms trade, war and militarism, the carceral system, and more. They are author of Banning the Bomb, Smashing the Patriarchy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021) and Abolishing State Violence: A World Beyond Bombs, Borders, and Cages (Haymarket Books, 2022).
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