Last Updated on February 5, 2026 by Chicago Policy Review Staff
At this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, two very different worlds were described.
One came from Donald Trump. He spoke of America as an indispensable power, hinted again at acquiring Greenland, and told his audience that allies such as Canada owed their survival to U.S. generosity.
The other came from Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney. In a carefully written address, he voiced what many leaders have long whispered: the post-war rules-based international order has fractured, and it will not be restored by wishful thinking. “The old order is not coming back,” he warned, noting that economic integration has become a tool of coercion.
Commentators have already dubbed this the Carney doctrine. Read alongside his January visit to Beijing and reports that Canada’s military has modelled a hypothetical U.S. invasion, it becomes something else: an emerging survival manual for so-called middle powers, written in the shadow of a superpower that has begun to treat allies as bargaining chips. If even Ottawa now designs policy around the possibility that alliances fail and neighbours turn hostile, then the politics of the “middle layer” in the international system will need to be rewritten.
Weaponized interdependence and middle power vulnerability
Carney starts with a blunt diagnosis. The institutions and narratives of the late 20th century order are now openly used as weapons: tariffs deployed against treaty allies as leverage on unrelated issues, dollar-based payment systems are throttled overnight as punishment and supply chains built for efficiency interrupted for geopolitical purposes.
For middle powers, this creates a distinctive predicament. They depend on those same instruments — access to reserve currencies, integration into supply chains, alliance guarantees — but lack the ability to set the terms unilaterally. Carney borrows a phrase from Finland’s president, Alexander Stubb, calling the response “values-based realism”: a foreign policy that still claims to defend sovereignty and human rights, yet accepts that power politics and economic coercion will shape the terrain. In this view, middle powers cannot rely on American guarantees or on abstract “rules.” Their security depends on what Carney calls sovereignty through optionality: decreasing dependence on any single hegemon, building dense networks with peers, and retaining the ability to walk away from lopsided bargains.
From Beijing to Davos: Canada as test case
The weeks around Davos show how this logic translates into policy. In mid-January, just days before the forum, Carney travelled to Beijing and announced a “strategic partnership” with China, stating that the relationship “sets Canada up well for ‘the new world order.’” Ottawa agreed to cut its 100% duty on Chinese electric vehicles to 6.1% for a limited quota of imports, while Beijing pledged to slash tariffs on Canadian canola seed from 84% to 15% and to lift restrictions on other farm and seafood exports.
In Davos, Carney presented this shift as one “tile” in a mosaic of diversified partnerships, rather than a pivot away from the United States. That diversification matters because the United States still absorbed about three quarters of Canada’s merchandise exports. Dependence is a structural fact that gives Washington enormous leverage when tariffs or export controls are weaponized.
The security side looks similar. Recent reporting suggests that, for the first time in over a century, Canada’s military has modelled how it would respond to an American invasion. The scenario is hypothetical, but the results are stark: Canada would be overwhelmed within days, then forced into a mix of insurgent tactics, drone strikes and ambushes while appealing to European allies for support.
The comforting language of alliance and shared values coexists with a structural asymmetry so extreme that Canada must quietly plan for the possibility that its primary security partner could become a threat.
What middle power theory missed
International relations scholarship has long cast middle powers as “norm entrepreneurs” and bridge-builders — states that lack the brute force of great powers but compensate by defending rules, mediating disputes and investing in multilateral institutions. Western middle powers in particular have been cast as custodians of the rules-based order.
Carney’s doctrine emerges in a less forgiving environment. He still speaks the language of norms. He affirms Ukrainian territorial integrity, backs NATO’s Article 5 and positions Canada as a defender of human rights. Yet he designs policy around a more uncomfortable fact: the material instruments of the old order are already used against allies, and legal guarantees have not prevented trade wars, secondary sanctions or sudden export controls.
The doctrine that follows is defensive rather than transformative. It seeks more partners, more redundancy, more exit options. It invests in energy independence and critical minerals, looks for alternative markets in Europe and Asia, and quietly acknowledges that a neighbour’s good will cannot be the only line of defence.
If middle power theory is to match this reality, it must abandon its favorite picture of well-meaning norm entrepreneurs. Middle powers must be understood as frontline shock-absorbers in a weaponized economy — the states that most visibly absorb the cost of tariffs, sanctions and supply-chain coercion, and therefore have the strongest incentives to change the rules. Alliances can no longer be treated as fixed constraints but must be modelled for their contingency, including scenarios of pressure, abandonment and even conflict between formal partners.
The risks of a “middle power club”
If Carney’s realism feels candid, it also exposes tensions that his admirers sometimes underplay. First, the China question. Describing Canada–China ties as a partnership suited to a “new world order” has sparked concern among labour groups and security analysts. They worry that Canadian workers will bear the brunt of renewed exposure to Chinese overcapacity and that critical infrastructure and data flows could become more vulnerable, even as U.S. dependence is trimmed. Supporters reply that China is only one tile in a diversified mosaic rather than a replacement patron.
Second, the unresolved normative ledger. Carney criticises the weaponization of trade and finance, yet Canada remains embedded in sanctions regimes and export control coalitions. His government has taken a more cautious line on conflicts such as in Gaza than many rights advocates consider acceptable, highlighting the distance between rhetorical “values-based realism” and the costs it is willing to pay.
Third, and most critically, the blind spot toward smaller states. The language of a “middle power alliance” is attractive to countries that see themselves as regional anchors, but it risks reproducing a familiar hierarchy in new form. While middle powers pursue “sovereignty through optionality,” the risk they are shedding does not simply disappear. It gets redistributed.
Consider the mechanics. When Canada reorganizes supply chains to reduce vulnerability, the countries left out of those new networks face starker choices and fewer alternatives. When a club of middle powers coordinates on sanctions or export controls, smaller states caught between competing blocs have less room to maneuver than before.
The emerging middle power club is not a coalition of the virtuous. It is a group trying to carve out bargaining space in a fragmenting system, and that space often comes at the expense of those with less leverage. Great powers still sit at the top, a self-aware club of middle powers organizes beneath, and then a long list of smaller and poorer states are asked to align without being invited to design the rules.
Living without nostalgia
Still, this survival memo is more honest than pretending the old story still holds. Carney’s core contribution is to make one uncomfortable sentence mainstream: The world many Western middle powers thought they lived in never fully existed, and it certainly does not exist now. The rules that protected capital flows and supply chains were unevenly applied. Security guarantees were always contingent on domestic politics in Washington. For states that sat between great powers and small, the feeling of safety was partly a narrative achievement.
Canada was often cited as an exemplary beneficiary of the old order. When a country that once embodied that order now plans for failed alliances and hostile neighbours, it is a sign that the center of gravity in world politics has already shifted.
For scholars, the work ahead is straightforward but uncomfortable: to stop writing middle powers off as norm entrepreneurs and start tracking them as pressure nodes — places where geopolitical stress is absorbed, redistributed, and sometimes passed down the hierarchy. If that tracking is honest enough, certain policy questions surface on their own. When Canada reduces dependence on the United States by diversifying supply chains, where does the vulnerability go? When a middle power club coordinates on export controls, who bears the cost of being left outside the club?
For smaller states, the window is closing. Waiting for the middle power club to finalize its rules before seeking a voice is the most dangerous strategy available. Entering the negotiation while terms are still being written is not idealism, it is basic arithmetic in a system where power is already being reorganized over their heads. We are now living between recycling old myths and learning to live without nostalgia, in a system where the scaffolding has already fallen away and the pressure is being reallocated in real time.