Let's talk about Canada declaring an end to the American order.... - Belle of the Ranch

[TexasTowelie]

Well, howdy there Internet people. It's Belle again. So, today we're going to talk about Canada declaring an end to the American order.

We've talked repeatedly about how Canada chose to put a world-renowned economist in the prime minister slot. That choice led to one of the most talked about speeches at Davos so far. To put it bluntly, he declared an end to the American order and to the system that kept the United States at the top of the global game since 1945. Even though Prime Minister Carney started speaking in French and then switched to English, he followed the standard tell them what you're going to tell them. Tell them tell them what you told them pattern.

I'll see if I can find a link to the whole speech. But we're going to go over the parts that world leaders will be focused on because Carney laid out a path. In the tell them phase, he took a shot at Trump and the US and teased the solution saying, "Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality where geopolitics where the large main power geopolitics is submitted to no limits, no constraints. On the other hand, I would like to tell you that the other countries, especially intermediate powers like Canada, are not powerless. They have the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty, and territorial integrity of the various states.” Right out of the gate, he's saying the US-led economic order is over and that a new one must be built.

Then he talked about how the order falls when people no longer participate in its fictions or rituals. He told the story of a Czech dissident who wouldn't play along. He then got more direct. "For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions. We praised its principles. We benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection. We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false. that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim. This fiction was useful and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving dispute.”

As he declared an end to the US-led order, he warned against nationalism and protectionism. "But let's be cleareyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable." He went on to predict that transactional powers will fail. And then he restated Canadian commitment to NATO and specifically to Article 5. Then he named dropped a bunch of international organizations, making it clear he sees the path ahead as being led by a coalition of middle-sized powers, working together and using the very institutions the US forged that Trump is now abandoning to replace US power and erode US dominance.

Near the end, he said, "We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn't mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy. But we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just. This is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine cooperation.”

Americans, it's time to really understand what's being said among world leaders. The subtext of this is that our closest allies aren't waiting for us to sort out our political mess at home. They're moving to building another order. And the US is no longer the world leader. Trump taking force off the table for Greenland might not change this. He might have waited too long.

Anyway, it's just a thought. Y'all have a good day.