Prime Minister Mark Carney speaks during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos on Tuesday.FABRICE COFFRINI/AFP/Getty Images
Katherine Blouin is an associate professor of history and classics at the University of Toronto. Matthew A. Sears is professor of classics at the University of New Brunswick.
On Jan. 20, Prime Minister Mark Carney gave a surprisingly candid speech at the 2026 World Economic Forum in Davos, insisting that the “rules-based international order” is a fiction on which we can no longer rely. His speech came after U.S. President Donald Trump posted an altered picture showing a map where Canada, Venezuela and Greenland are covered with an American flag.
To set up his speech, framed by Václav Havel’s essay The Power of the Powerless, Mr. Carney quoted a famous line from the ancient Greek historian and general Thucydides: “The strong do what they can; the weak suffer what they must.” This kind of lawless might-is-right approach to international relations, Mr. Carney argued, is precisely what we can no longer afford.
Read and watch Mark Carney's Davos speech at the World Economic Forum
Carney stands with Greenland, criticizes Trump without naming him in blunt Davos speech
This aphorism, long championed by realist political theorists, comes from Thucydides’s Melian Dialogue, in which representatives from the small and relatively powerless island of Melos debate their freedom with imperial Athens – a hegemon, as Mr. Carney would say. Amid the Peloponnesian War between the Athenians and the Spartans, the Melians were given a choice: either surrender and pay tribute, or be destroyed. In 416 BC, following the Melians’ refusal to surrender, Athenian forces besieged the island, killed all military-aged men, sold the women and children into slavery, and gave the land over to Athenian settlers.
In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides reimagined the dialogue between the Athenians and Melians that preceded the siege. The Melians appeal to justice, while the Athenians respond with the line quoted by Mr. Carney. The Melians’ reply, which the Prime Minister did not cite, is nevertheless hinted at in the rest of his speech: “In our opinion it is in your interest to maintain a principle which is for the good of all – that anyone in danger should have just and equitable treatment ... This is in your interest as much as ours, for your fall would involve you in a crushing punishment that would be a lesson to the world.”
Given the fate of Melos, it really might seem as though justice has no place in international relations – that only power determines things. Yet, after becoming hated by virtually all the Greeks and watching ally after ally revolt from its brutal hegemony, Athens lost the war. Thucydides wrote the Melian Dialogue with this end in mind, just as Mr. Carney delivered his speech with an apparent eye to the inevitability of the collapse of the American empire. Far from presenting justice and expediency as opposites, with expediency winning out, Thucydides means for his readers to conceive of justice as expedient.
Opinion: As the old order fractures, middle powers must seize the moment
Mr. Carney’s speech focuses on the rupture of the “rules-based order” as it applies to the relationship between what he calls “middle powers” and the American hegemon (which he never names explicitly). Yet, as Mr. Carney himself hints, these same middle powers have for decades happily acted as vassals of the United States. As such, they have not only maintained the illusion of the rules-based order through ritualistic “performances of sovereignty” that are now backfiring; they have also enabled a plethora of U.S.-led Melian tragedies worldwide, including in Gaza and Venezuela.
Just as the hubris that characterizes the Athenians’ horrific treatment of the Melians foreshadowed their own eventual fall against the Spartans, so is America’s open dismemberment of the rules-based order symptomatic of its unfolding collapse. When Mr. Carney, an expert on economic risk management, speaks of a “rupture,” he refers not only to the tearing of the veil of democracy, equality and freedom that has been used to sugar-coat American imperialism for decades, but also to the more-than-precarious position of the American economy, which tariffs and dedollarization might only worsen.
Though resistance might have appeared futile and foolish at the height of Athenian power, and the people of Melos certainly paid a high price, that was not the conclusion of the story. In the end, the Athenians suffered the consequences of the brutal world they helped to forge. Fortune being a fickle thing, and imperial hubris a self-sabotaging curse, even the greatest powers are eventually eclipsed or overthrown. Treating everyone justly, including (or especially?) the less powerful, is not only the right thing to do; it is also, in the long run, in the interests of all parties. We need true justice in international relations – for the sake of our humanity, but also to enjoy its protections when we find ourselves at the wrong end of power relations.