Taking the Sign Out of the Window: Mark Carney, Middle Powers, and the Managed Truth of a Fortifying World

When the Lie Stops Paying the Rent

Empires don’t usually confess. They rehearse. They polish phrases, mint doctrines, and repeat the same lines until the audience forgets where the stage ends and reality begins. But every so often—usually when the bills come due—the performance falters. Mark Carney’s speech at Davos belongs to that moment. It is not a moral reckoning. It is not courage. It is what happens when the old story becomes too expensive to keep telling. When the lie no longer pays the rent.

For decades, the “rules-based international order” functioned like a loyalty program for the privileged. Play along, repeat the slogans, tolerate the hypocrisy, and enjoy the stability. The rules were never neutral, never evenly enforced, never meant to protect the weak. They were a convenience—a polite cover for power. The Global South learned this lesson at gunpoint, through sanctions, coups, debt traps, blockades, and invasions. What’s new is that parts of the imperial core are now being asked to live with the consequences of an order that can no longer subsidize its own illusions.

Carney names this moment a “rupture,” and in doing so he lets something slip. Not the truth of injustice—that truth has always been obvious to those on the receiving end—but the truth of cost. The old order worked as long as it could buy compliance cheaply: open sea lanes without constant threats, trade without permanent tariff wars, finance without overt financial strangulation. But when hegemony weakens, the theater grows expensive. Tariffs become weapons. Payment systems become pressure points. Supply chains turn into choke collars. And suddenly, repeating the ritual phrases about shared values and common rules starts to sound less like leadership and more like bad accounting.

This is what it looks like when an empire starts explaining itself. Not with drama, but with spreadsheets. Not with vision, but with risk assessments. The speech reads like an x-ray of a system that knows something is wrong but refuses to name the cause. The problem is not that the world has become unruly. The problem is that the world no longer obeys automatically. China builds instead of begging. The Global South trades without permission. Multipolarity doesn’t arrive with a manifesto; it arrives with alternatives. And alternatives are poison to a system that survives on monopoly.

That is why Davos matters. This is where the ruling class gathers to teach itself a new language for the same old power. When legitimacy thins, management takes over. When consensus fails, coordination replaces consent. When universal principles become inconvenient, they are quietly retired and replaced with words like “resilience,” “autonomy,” and “risk mitigation.” These are not neutral terms. They are the vocabulary of an order learning how to govern without pretending to be fair.

Carney’s honesty is not a break from empire; it is a sub-imperial power adapting to leaner conditions. The lie is being withdrawn not because it was immoral, but because it has become inefficient. And when the lie stops paying, power does not disappear. It reorganizes. It tightens its grip on corridors and bottlenecks. It looks for cheaper ways to enforce discipline. It recruits allies not with promises, but with insurance schemes against chaos it helped create. This speech is not the end of an era. It is the sound of furniture being moved behind the curtain, while the audience is told—calmly, professionally—that the show will go on, just with fewer illusions and sharper edges.

Truth as a Management Tool

Having admitted that the old lie no longer works, Carney does not ask what kind of truth might liberate those crushed beneath it. He asks a different question altogether: how should power operate once it stops pretending? This is where Václav Havel enters the speech—not as a dissident, not as a threat to domination, but as a consultant for a new style of rule. The story of the greengrocer removing the sign is stripped of its danger and repurposed as managerial wisdom. Stop performing rituals you no longer believe in, Carney suggests, not so the system can fall, but so it can function more efficiently.

In Havel’s hands, truth was corrosive. It undermined power by exposing the emptiness at its core. In Carney’s retelling, truth is hygienic. It clears away outdated slogans so that domination can proceed without friction. The problem with the old order, we are told, is not that it subordinated the many to the few, but that it relied too heavily on shared illusions. Once those illusions lose credibility, they must be discarded—not in favor of justice, but in favor of realism. This is truth drained of its emancipatory content and reinserted as an operating principle for elites.

This is an important shift, and a dangerous one. When ritual governance collapses, power does not retreat. It sheds ceremony. The old language of universal rules, mutual benefit, and collective progress gave the system a moral buffer. It allowed violence to be framed as exception, coercion as enforcement, hierarchy as natural order. Now that buffer is thinning. Carney’s speech marks the transition to a colder register, where power no longer needs to persuade everyone of its virtue—only to ensure that resistance is fragmented and manageable.

This is why “living the truth,” in Carney’s formulation, does not mean confronting empire’s crimes or dismantling its structures. It means naming reality selectively. Call out coercion when it comes from rivals, but treat coercion by allies as regrettable necessity. Admit that rules are unevenly applied, but continue to benefit from their asymmetry. Speak openly about rivalry and pressure, while presenting your own buildup—military, industrial, technological—as defensive prudence. The truth, in this context, is not universal. It is curated.

What disappears in this move is the people. Havel’s greengrocer mattered because his small refusal revealed the fragility of the system. Carney’s version has no such actor. There is no worker taking down a sign, no collective refusal, no popular force capable of cracking the façade. Instead, truth flows from above, dispensed by prime ministers, central bankers, and strategists who decide which illusions are obsolete and which must be retained a little longer. Truth becomes a privilege of command.

This is how a ruling class prepares itself for harder times. It abandons the stories that require consistency and embraces a realism that asks only for compliance. The ritual phrases are retired not because they were false, but because they were no longer useful. What replaces them is a leaner vocabulary—power without apology, coordination without consent, honesty without accountability. And once truth is reduced to a management tool, the next step follows naturally: if persuasion no longer suffices, pressure must do the work. When the lie is gone, leverage takes its place.

When Integration Turns Into a Weapon

Once truth is repurposed as a tool of management, the next admission comes easily: the world economy is no longer a field of cooperation but a terrain of pressure. Carney says it plainly—economic integration has become a weapon. Tariffs are leverage. Finance is coercion. Supply chains are vulnerabilities waiting to be exploited. This is not a revelation pulled from thin air. It is the moment when the imperial core finally begins to experience, in diluted form, what the periphery has lived with for generations. What is presented as a new era is simply coercion coming home.

For decades, integration was sold as destiny. Open markets would civilize conflict. Trade would pacify rivals. Interdependence would discipline ambition. But this was always a story told by those who controlled the choke points—shipping lanes, currencies, credit, insurance, standards, and courts. Integration only looks mutual when one side owns the plumbing. When power is asymmetrical, interdependence is not a shared bond; it is a noose with adjustable tension. The surprise is not that the system has become coercive. The surprise is how long it took the center to admit it.

Carney frames this shift as a breakdown in trust among great powers, as if bad behavior suddenly contaminated an otherwise healthy system. But the system was built to discipline. It just worked quietly when the hegemon could afford subtlety. Now, as monopoly-finance capital runs up against stagnation and multipolar competition, subtlety becomes a luxury. Pressure replaces persuasion. Control over circulation replaces dominance in production. The world shrinks from a map of nations into a diagram of corridors, bottlenecks, and pressure points.

This is the political economy beneath the speech. When an empire can no longer command obedience through growth and legitimacy, it turns to friction. Slow the adversary’s access to chips. Price their energy exports out of markets. Threaten secondary sanctions. Dangle market access like a ration card. Integration does not disappear; it is retooled. The same networks that once promised efficiency are rewired for discipline. The supply chain becomes a battlefield not because globalization failed, but because it succeeded too well at centralizing control.

Carney’s honesty here is instructive, even if incomplete. He acknowledges that a country unable to feed itself, fuel itself, or defend itself has few options when rules no longer protect it. This is true—but it is also revealing. Sovereignty is quietly redefined. It no longer means popular control over economic life or collective decision-making. It means insulation from retaliation. The capacity to absorb pressure without breaking. In other words, sovereignty is reduced to endurance within a coercive system, not freedom from it.

At this point, the logic tightens. If integration is a weapon and isolation is ruinous, there is no safe outside. Every state is forced to calculate its exposure, to map its dependencies, to decide which corridors it cannot afford to lose. The world that emerges is not one of shared rules but of managed vulnerability. And once that is accepted, a new problem appears on the horizon: how does a state that is not a hegemon survive in a world where leverage decides outcomes? That question is the bridge to Carney’s next move, and to the doctrine of the so-called middle powers.

The Discovery of the Middle Powers

Once the world is understood as a field of leverage rather than law, survival becomes a problem of scale. Carney arrives here almost naturally. If great powers can weaponize integration and small states are crushed by it, then the countries in between must find another way to breathe. This is the moment when the “middle powers” step onto the stage—not as rebels against the system, but as its most anxious managers. Their emergence is not ideological; it is situational. They exist because hegemony no longer guarantees stability and isolation guarantees collapse.

Carney frames this as a call to cooperation, and on the surface it sounds reasonable. Middle powers, he argues, cannot afford to negotiate alone with a hegemon that dictates terms. Bilateralism becomes submission dressed up as diplomacy. In that context, coordination appears as common sense: pool resources, align standards, share the cost of resilience. Build together what no single state can build on its own. The language is calm, almost technocratic, but the anxiety beneath it is unmistakable. This is what coordination looks like when fear, not solidarity, is the binding force.

What is being proposed is not a break from empire but a collective adaptation to its changing weather. The middle powers are invited to form a buffer layer between raw coercion and total dependency. They are to stabilize one another so the shocks of great-power rivalry do not tear them apart individually. In practice, this means insurance schemes against disruption, shared procurement against scarcity, and collective bargaining against pressure. Cooperation, yes—but cooperation designed to make a coercive system tolerable, not to replace it.

This is where the idea of a “third path” begins to take shape, and where it starts to wobble. Carney presents middle-power coordination as an alternative to submission or confrontation, but the alternative never leaves the terrain of leverage. It does not imagine a world beyond weaponized interdependence. It imagines a world where exposure is managed more efficiently. The hierarchy remains intact; the risks are simply redistributed. The middle powers are not offered emancipation. They are offered better terms on their vulnerability.

There is a quiet admission buried here. Collective resilience is cheaper than national fortresses because the fortresses are already being built. The world Carney describes is explicitly one of fortification—energy security, food security, defense security, supply chain security. The only question is whether these walls rise separately or in concert. Cooperation is not opposed to fortresses; it is the method by which they are standardized, interconnected, and rendered interoperable. What emerges is not openness restored, but enclosure rationalized.

And so the middle powers discover themselves not as historical agents of transformation, but as administrators of a narrowing system. They are summoned to act together precisely because they lack the capacity to set the terms of the game. Their coordination is a response to weakness, not strength. It is an attempt to survive between giants without being crushed, even if that survival requires helping to stabilize the very structures that produce the pressure. From here, the next contradiction becomes unavoidable: if coordination is necessary, what kind of autonomy does it actually produce, and for whom?

Autonomy for the State, Not for the People

Having discovered the middle powers as a collective survival strategy, Carney moves to the concept that gives this coordination its moral cover: strategic autonomy. It sounds reassuring, almost emancipatory, as if sovereignty were finally being reclaimed from a chaotic world. But when you listen closely, autonomy is not defined as popular control over economic life, or as freedom from exploitation, or as the ability of societies to decide their own futures. It is defined narrowly, clinically, as the capacity of the state to endure pressure. Autonomy here is not about choice. It is about insulation.

Carney’s inventory is revealing. Energy security. Food security. Critical minerals. Artificial intelligence. Defense production. Supply chains. These are the pillars of autonomy in his telling, and they all point in the same direction: the strengthening of state-capital logistics under conditions of rivalry. Labor does not appear as a subject, only as an input. Redistribution does not appear at all. Ecology enters only as a constraint to be managed, never as a boundary that must not be crossed. The people are present only implicitly, folded into the phrase “national resilience,” like unnamed workers inside a factory diagram.

This is where the logic of the speech tightens into something familiar. Autonomy is framed as a technical problem to be solved by investment flows, procurement strategies, and industrial policy. The question is not who controls these systems, but how quickly they can be mobilized. Not whether production serves human need, but whether it can be redirected under stress. What is being rebuilt is not democratic capacity, but command capacity. The state prepares itself to bargain harder abroad by consolidating power at home.

In this sense, strategic autonomy mirrors the internal logic of the American Pole I’ve already traced elsewhere. Before a state can project confidence outward, it must discipline its internal terrain. Productive capacity is revived not to liberate workers from precarity, but to integrate them into a more competitive, more militarized economy. Investment is accelerated not to meet social needs, but to ensure readiness for long-term confrontation. The language of autonomy masks a deeper project of consolidation.

What disappears in this formulation is any notion of autonomy from below. There is no discussion of who bears the cost of resilience, who absorbs the shocks when supply chains are rerouted, who is asked to work longer, relocate, retrain, or accept austerity in the name of national preparedness. Autonomy is imagined as a national attribute, floating above class divisions, when in reality it is constructed through them. Some are insulated so that others can be exposed. Some gain security so that others can be disciplined.

And yet this narrowing is presented as necessity. When rules no longer protect you, Carney says, you must protect yourself. True enough. But protection, as defined here, flows upward. It shields capital, infrastructure, and state capacity first, and asks society to adapt around that priority. Strategic autonomy becomes the right of the state to reorganize economic life without democratic interruption, justified by an external threat that never quite leaves the frame. From this vantage point, the next step follows almost automatically: if autonomy must be built, it must be built through concrete systems of power—military, industrial, and technological. The question then becomes how this autonomy is materialized, and where its walls are actually rising.

Where Values Harden into Infrastructure

Once strategic autonomy is defined as endurance rather than emancipation, it has to take material form. Values alone cannot absorb pressure; they must be translated into steel, sensors, contracts, and corridors. This is where Carney’s language about principles quietly gives way to logistics. The speech stops floating and starts to land. Autonomy ceases to be an aspiration and becomes a build list. Radar systems in the Arctic. Defense procurement agreements with Europe. Expanded military capacity under NATO. Investments in surveillance, shipping routes, and critical supply chains. This is the point where “values-based realism” reveals its true content: realism backed by infrastructure.

Canada’s role in this architecture is not accidental. Geography assigns it a function long before ideology does. The High North becomes a corridor to be monitored, a frontier to be secured, a space where great-power rivalry is anticipated rather than debated. Over-the-horizon radar, expanded naval capacity, integration into NORAD modernization—these are not defensive abstractions. They are the concrete mechanisms by which a middle power plugs itself into the nervous system of a fortress world. Surveillance becomes solidarity. Militarization becomes responsibility.

The same logic extends across the Atlantic. Canada’s deepening integration into European defense procurement frameworks is presented as cooperation among equals, but its material effect is standardization and alignment. Shared procurement reduces cost, yes—but it also locks participants into a common strategic posture. Interoperability is not just technical compatibility; it is political discipline embedded in hardware. Once your systems speak the same language, your options narrow. Autonomy is achieved not by standing apart, but by fitting more snugly into a larger machine.

This is where the middle powers become something else entirely. No longer merely states seeking shelter from coercion, they become nodes in a distributed enforcement architecture. Europe arms itself not to escape dependency, but to absorb more of the burden. Canada fortifies the Arctic not to demilitarize it, but to ensure it remains legible and controllable within NATO’s frame. Each contribution is justified as defensive, prudent, even inevitable. Taken together, they form a lattice of power that hardens the system while claiming to stabilize it.

What is striking is how seamlessly values are fused to hardware in this process. Human rights, sovereignty, and the rule of law are invoked at the level of rhetoric, while at the level of practice the emphasis falls on deterrence, surveillance, and readiness. The moral language does not disappear; it is simply bolted onto infrastructure that operates according to a different logic. The fist is not hidden behind the principles so much as wrapped in them, making coercion feel procedural rather than violent.

At this stage, the outline of a fortress system becomes clear. Middle powers do not escape the American Pole; they reinforce it from the inside. They contribute capacity, legitimacy, and geographic reach in exchange for insulation from volatility. The price of that insulation is alignment—embedded not just in treaties, but in cables, platforms, and procurement cycles that cannot be easily unwound. Autonomy is achieved, paradoxically, by surrendering degrees of freedom to a collective structure designed to manage decline.

And yet, even as this infrastructure solidifies, another tension surfaces. A system built on fortification must still interact with a world it cannot fully control. Supply chains cross rival blocs. Markets remain interdependent. Capital seeks returns wherever they appear. The question that now presses forward is unavoidable: how does a middle power fortified inside one pole manage its exposure to another? How does it reconcile deepening militarized alignment with the need to trade, invest, and survive in a multipolar economy? It is at this point that Carney turns to China—and where the contradictions of managed multipolarity come fully into view.

Multipolarity Without Defection

Having built the scaffolding of autonomy through alignment, Carney arrives at the most delicate maneuver in the speech: how to acknowledge multipolarity without abandoning the pole he is standing on. The world, he insists, is no longer unipolar. Power is diffused. Rival centers exist. And yet this recognition never matures into defection. It becomes instead a choreography of calibration—engage here, hedge there, diversify without crossing the lines that define acceptable movement. Multipolarity is admitted as a condition, not embraced as a project.

Nowhere is this balancing act clearer than in the treatment of China. Carney speaks of strategic partnerships, of engagement with open eyes, of cooperation where interests align. But the language is careful, almost surgical. China is not named as an alternative pole with its own legitimacy, only as a partner on specific issues within a system still anchored elsewhere. Engagement is framed as risk management, not realignment. Trade becomes diversification, not integration. Cooperation becomes transactional, not transformative.

This is multipolarity stripped of its emancipatory potential. It does not imagine a world where different development paths coexist on equal footing. It imagines a world where exposure to each pole is optimized like a portfolio. Canada, in this vision, does not choose sides so much as it prices its dependencies. Too much reliance on any one power is dangerous, so relationships are spread out—not to escape coercion altogether, but to ensure no single actor can apply it decisively.

The rhetoric of “variable geometry” captures this perfectly. Different coalitions for different problems. Different alignments for different risks. This is not solidarity; it is modular governance. States plug in and out of arrangements as circumstances demand, without challenging the underlying hierarchy that makes such maneuvering necessary in the first place. Multipolarity becomes a management technique, a way to navigate rivalry without confronting its roots.

For middle powers, this strategy has a certain elegance. It promises room to breathe without requiring rupture. It allows engagement with China, India, ASEAN, and the Global South while maintaining the security umbrella of the Atlantic system. But this elegance rests on a fragile assumption: that the poles will tolerate such balancing indefinitely. That great powers engaged in systemic rivalry will continue to permit selective autonomy from those embedded in their security architectures.

This is the unresolved contradiction at the heart of Carney’s approach. You cannot fully embed yourself in one pole’s military and surveillance infrastructure while claiming neutral flexibility in another’s economic orbit. At some point, alignment hardens into expectation. Choices that were once framed as diversification are reinterpreted as disloyalty. The space for maneuver narrows precisely as rivalry intensifies.

And so multipolarity, in this telling, is not a break with imperial organization but its rebalancing. The middle powers are encouraged to acknowledge the new world while continuing to stabilize the old one. They are asked to engage rising powers without empowering them, to trade without trusting, to cooperate without converging. It is a careful dance performed on a tightening floor—one that postpones confrontation but does not resolve it. From here, the final question presses forward: what happens when calibration is no longer enough, and the demand to choose becomes explicit?

Choosing Without Admitting the Choice

At the edge of Carney’s framework lies the moment it never names but quietly prepares for: the point at which calibration collapses into decision. The speech insists that middle powers can remain flexible, principled and pragmatic, diversified but aligned. Yet the architecture he describes steadily erodes that possibility. Infrastructure fixes relationships in place. Security commitments harden expectations. Procurement cycles, intelligence sharing, and military integration do not tolerate permanent ambiguity. They demand reliability. And reliability, in a world of hard rivalry, is another word for loyalty.

This is why the speech works so hard to deny that a choice is being made, even as it describes one in motion. Canada is said to engage broadly while building its strength at home. It supports Ukraine unequivocally. It integrates deeper into NATO’s northern and western flanks. It opposes tariffs over Greenland. It coordinates critical minerals through G7 buyers’ clubs. Each step is framed as situational, rational, unavoidable. Taken together, they form a pattern that points in a single direction.

What makes this moment politically sensitive is that it cannot be sold as ideology. The era when alignment could be justified through universal narratives—democracy versus authoritarianism, freedom versus tyranny—has thinned. Carney knows this. Instead, the justification shifts to risk. Risk of coercion. Risk of isolation. Risk of exposure. The population is not asked to believe in a global mission, only to accept a defensive posture as common sense. Choice is disguised as prudence.

For middle powers, this framing is crucial. To admit openly that a side has been chosen would provoke domestic and international resistance. It would expose the costs of alignment: militarization, surveillance, industrial discipline, constrained diplomacy. By presenting alignment as the accumulation of reasonable responses to external pressure, the state preserves legitimacy while narrowing options. The choice is made gradually, bureaucratically, and without ceremony.

This is the quiet politics of a fortifying world. Decisions that reshape a country’s place in the global order are recoded as technical adjustments. Parliament debates budgets, not trajectories. Citizens are told about investments, not commitments. The language of inevitability does the heavy lifting, suggesting that there was never really an alternative worth considering. History is rendered managerial.

Yet beneath this managerial calm lies a sharper reality. Once a choice is embedded in systems rather than speeches, reversing it becomes costly, even unthinkable. Supply chains are reorganized. Defense industries are synchronized. Intelligence architectures are shared. At that point, even a change in government cannot easily unwind the direction taken. Autonomy, which was promised as protection, becomes path dependency.

This is the final contradiction Carney’s address leaves unresolved. The middle powers are urged to live in truth, to remove the sign from the window, to stop pretending the old order still functions. And yet a new pretense takes its place: that one can fully prepare for a world of blocs without belonging to one. The speech gestures toward honesty while constructing a framework that delays its consequences. What remains is a politics of deferred admission—of choosing without saying so—until the moment arrives when the choice announces itself, no longer as policy, but as fate.

Truth as Strategy, or Strategy as Alibi

Carney closes his address by returning to the language of honesty. Take the sign out of the window. Stop living within the lie. Name the world as it is. On its surface, this is the most compelling move in the speech. It echoes Havel not as nostalgia but as method: legitimacy flows from refusing false rituals, from acting in accordance with reality rather than clinging to comforting myths. But once placed alongside the architecture he has just laid out, this call to truth acquires a second meaning. Honesty becomes less a rupture with power than a rebranding of its exercise.

The truth that is being named is carefully bounded. Yes, the rules-based order no longer functions as advertised. Yes, great powers weaponize integration. Yes, vulnerability must be reduced. But other truths remain unspoken: that coercion is not an aberration but the operating logic of the system; that middle-power resilience stabilizes, rather than challenges, imperial hierarchy; that the costs of autonomy are borne unevenly by workers, Indigenous communities, and the global periphery. These omissions are not accidental. They are the price of keeping strategy intact while appearing candid.

In this way, truth itself is folded into governance. To “live in truth” is no longer to withdraw consent from an unjust system, as it was for Havel’s greengrocer, but to accept the system’s harshness as natural and then manage it more effectively. The lie that is rejected is sentimental universalism; the lie that remains is inevitability. Power does not disappear. It simply speaks more plainly about its constraints while leaving its foundations untouched.

This is why the speech resonates so strongly with technocratic audiences. It offers moral clarity without demanding structural change. It replaces faith in rules with confidence in capacity. It invites listeners to feel sober rather than radical, realistic rather than rebellious. The appeal is not to solidarity from below, but to competence from above. Truth is invoked not to disrupt power, but to recalibrate its legitimacy under new conditions.

From a Weaponized Information standpoint, this is the decisive inversion. The language of honesty, stripped of class analysis, becomes an alibi for consolidation. Living in truth is redefined as accepting rivalry, fortification, and alignment as unavoidable facts of life. The greengrocer no longer removes the sign to expose the system’s fragility; he replaces it with a new sign that reads “This is how the world really works,” and the ritual continues in a more austere key.

What Carney ultimately offers is not a break with imperial realism, but its modernization. The old lie—that rules would protect the weak—is abandoned. The new truth—that strength determines outcomes—is normalized. In this transition, middle powers are encouraged to see themselves as honest actors precisely because they have accepted their subordinate position within a managed hierarchy. The system survives not by deception, but by disciplined acknowledgment of its own violence.

The danger here is not cynicism, but closure. When realism becomes common sense and alternatives are dismissed as naive, history is quietly sealed off. The horizon shrinks to what can be managed within existing power relations. The speech ends by inviting others to join Canada on this path, presenting it as open, cooperative, and principled. But the path has already been laid. The invitation is not to imagine a different world, but to help administer a harsher one with clearer eyes.

In that sense, the address succeeds on its own terms. It names the end of one illusion and installs another, more durable one in its place: that there is no emancipatory exit from rivalry, only better techniques for surviving it. To refuse that conclusion is the task left unspoken. And it is precisely there—beyond managed truth, beyond calibrated honesty—that the real struggle over the future begins.