Mark Carney tells middle powers to build strategic autonomy together

What happened

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney used his special address on 20 January to argue that the old rules-based international order had entered a fundamental rupture. Rather than retreating into isolation, he called on middle powers to cooperate more deliberately, diversify relationships and build greater strategic autonomy.

Why it mattered

The speech gave a coherent political frame to a theme running across the week: countries that are neither superpowers nor willing satellites are looking for more room to manoeuvre. For business, that translates into a world of more diversified trade, investment, supply chains and security relationships.

Carney’s argument also connected geopolitics with economics. Resilience, domestic capacity and values-based partnerships were presented not as temporary defensive measures but as part of a longer-term strategy.

Davos 2026 context

The address landed amid unusually intense debate over Greenland, tariffs, European security and the future of transatlantic relations. It therefore became more than a national policy speech: it was widely read as a blueprint for how middle powers could organize in a more competitive global system.

Image credit and rights

Hero image: Mark Carney with Masato Kanda at the 2026 World Economic Forum. Photo by Masato Kanda / Asian Development Bank President via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0.

Editorial note

This is an original Davos Collective synthesis of the underlying development. Multiple reports on the same address are treated as sources for this single canonical story, not as separate archive entries.