Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks during the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Tuesday.Markus Schreiber/The Associated Press
Colin Robertson is a former diplomat and host of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute’s Global Exchange podcast.
Mark Carney is right. The rules-based order on which we built security, prosperity and diplomatic influence is “fading” as the “most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as coercion.”
Canada, Mr. Carney told his Davos audience, hinting that other middle powers must now act together, is “pursuing variable geometry” by reshaping multilateralism into “coalitions that work, issue by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together.”
Rules and institutions are the only way to manage the power differential between big, middle and small nations. Canada invested in structures – the UN, NATO, the WTO – that made power predictable, negotiable, and at least partly constrainable.
Multilateralism for Canada has always been a strategy: a way to civilize power. Functionalism – to earn a seat at tables otherwise reserved for giants through capacity, capability and competence – constrained asymmetry.
Institutions mattered. The post-1945 order gave middle powers three assets: a voice through institutions where even small states could speak; stability through rules that made behaviour more predictable; and access to markets, security guarantees and diplomatic influence.
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For decades, multilateralism delivered. It helped prevent a great-power war, even if proxy conflicts persisted. Institutions, alliances and economic integration changed the cost-benefit calculus of war. It enabled prosperity through trade regimes and financial institutions. And it created space for middle powers to exercise influence.
Multilateralism never eliminated power. But it organized it, levelling the playing field. Capacity and competence earned a place at the table.
Yet the system also failed in ways that now threaten its survival. It ignored social fracture at home. It tolerated double standards abroad. It often became technocratic and distant. And rising powers increasingly saw it as stacked against them.
Those failures created the political space for U.S. President Donald Trump to declare that some multilateral organizations “operate contrary to U.S. national interests, security, economic prosperity, or sovereignty.”
This matters because the postwar order always rested on a paradox: It constrained American power only because America chose to be constrained. Under Mr. Trump, it is choosing otherwise.
Multilateralism can survive, but not in its old form with the U.S. as a gravitational centre.
As Mr. Carney points out, a world of spheres of influence, bilateral coercion, and transactional diplomacy is a world where rules exist on paper while power decides in practice.
What replaces the old order will be messier, with power more distributed and more conditional. It will be sustained by coalitions of the willing, as we are doing with Ukraine, Greenland, critical minerals and plurilateral trade.
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Working with the like-minded, instead of chasing universal agreements that depend on great-power buy-in, Canada should prioritize regional and transregional partnerships as well as issue-specific clubs on climate, health, technology, the Arctic, oceans, and supply chains.
Mr. Carney’s values-based realism is multilateralism without illusions: co-operation among those willing to co-operate, recognizing they are no substitute for sovereign power.
Instead of grand institutional redesigns, middle powers must focus on concrete problems: pandemic response, climate adaptation, AI governance, Arctic security, supply-chain resilience. Solve problems, build habits of co-operation, and let institutions mature.
But middle powers only matter when they have something to bring to the table. That requires serious defence capability, economic resilience, technological competence, and sustained investment in diplomacy and development assistance.
Canada’s diplomatic successes since 1945 came from two strengths. First, acting as a linchpin: interpreting the United States to the world and the world to the United States. Second, being a helpful fixer: shaping norms around peacekeeping, refugee resettlement, arms control, and human security, from landmines to the responsibility to protect.
With Mr. Trump, our linchpin role is in limbo. But being a “useful” nation still serves our interests and underscores our values. Even in a fragmented world, middle powers can still define what “normal” looks like.
Not all institutions can, or should, be saved. Canada must decide where to invest political capital in reform and where to build replacements through new coalitions. That means choices long avoided: diversifying economic and security ties; investing seriously in defence and resilience; treating multilateralism as strategy, not identity; accepting that rules need power behind them.
When the rules’ referee turned rogue, order will survive only where states choose to sustain it. As Mr. Carney argues, this means building coalitions, investing in capacity, and solving real problems. It also means accepting a hard truth: rules matter only when someone is willing and able to defend and enforce them.
This is “values-based realism.”
For Canada and the other middle powers, that is now the test: whether we still believe rules are worth the work it takes to make them real.