Mark Carney: The Candid Canadian

 To construct a moral worldview for times out of joint, one has to be a realist. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney received a standing ovation after his speech at Davos be­cause he not only addressed the oft-abused ‘zeitgeist’ but also offered cues for living with it. “The old order is not coming back. We should not mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy,” he said, without referring to Donald Trump.

In a speech Carney had writ­ten himself and that might yet go down in history for its geopolitical aphorisms, he laid bare the reality of a world where “the strong do what they can, and the weak suffer what they must.” But it needn’t be that bad: “The question for middle powers, like Canada, is not whether to adapt to this new reality. We must. The question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls—or whether we can do some­thing more ambitious.” Middle powers must act together, which of course is easier said than done, but Carney is adapting to what is a “variable geometry” to form different coalitions for different issues, based on values and interests.

Well, a major power like India understood that variable geometry long ago, preserv­ing its strategic autonomy. But Carney was actually asking Europe to wake up to the fact that the post-war certainties are dead and gone.