Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney told the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, that the world should stop appeasing Donald Trump. The South African government has railed against the post-war international order, but could the country have a role in a new order of middle powers? Like much of the rest of the world, South Africans, including the government, would have joined the audience at Davos, Switzerland, in loudly applauding Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s declaration on Tuesday that the time had come to stop appeasing global bullies like US President Donald Trump.
The annual meeting of the World Economic Forum at Davos had been dominated by Trump’s threat to take Greenland by force from Denmark — a threat which, if executed, would probably destroy Nato and implode the Western alliance. However, in his speech at Davos on Wednesday, Trump walked back from his threat to use military force to take Greenland — but did not abandon his ambition to seize it somehow, presumably by economic coercion. On Tuesday, Carney said it was time to stop pretending that a rules-based international order, with the US at its apex, still existed.
That “nice story” was ending and being replaced by “a brutal reality where geopolitics among the great powers is not subject to any constraints. “Great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs as leverage.
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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,” said Carney.
“The multilateral institutions on which middle powers have relied — the WTO [World Trade Organization], the UN, the COP [Conference of the Parties] — the very architecture of collective problem solving, are under threat. “It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry,” said Carney. “That the rules-based order is fading.
That the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.” This state of affairs was presented as the inevitable, natural logic of international relations reasserting itself. “And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along. To accommodate.
To avoid trouble. To hope that compliance will buy safety.” Countries, he noted, were now competing among themselves to avoid being targeted, and many countries were drawing the same conclusions — that they must “develop greater strategic autonomy: in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains”. This was understandable. “When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.” But this was leading to a “world of fortresses” which would be “poorer, more fragile and less sustainable.
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