Mark Carney

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 disputes.

So we placed the sign in the window.

We participated in the rituals.

And we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.

This bargain no longer works.

Let me be direct.

We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration.

But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons.

Tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.

You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

Multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied, the WTO, the UN, the COP, the architecture, the very architecture of collective problem solving are under threat.

And as a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions, that they must develop greater strategic autonomy in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains.

And this impulse is understandable.

A country that can't feed itself, fuel itself, or defend itself has few options.

When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.

But let's be clear-eyed about where this leads.

A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable.

And there's another truth.

If great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate.