It’s something the rest of the world already knew, after two years of genocide in Gaza, and attacks on Iran and Venezuela. The old international order is dead.
Mark Carney’s speech at Davos may one day be compared to the speech made by Winston Churchill in Fulton, Missouri, in 1946 when he said an “iron curtain” had descended over Europe, marking the start of the Cold War.
The Canadian prime minister declared the end of the post-1945 US-led order and the birth of a new one. “We live in an era of great power rivalry,” he said, in which “the rules-based order is fading”, and “the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must”.
Other western leaders took a similarly stark tone about how US President Donald Trump was tearing apart the western alliance.
“Until now, we tried to appease the new president in the White House but so many lines have been crossed…Being a happy vassal is one thing, being a miserable slave is something else,” said Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever.
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After weeks of threats against his Nato allies to hand over Greenland, the Danish-owned Arctic island, Trump arrived at Davos, swaggering about his achievements and calling Europe “not recognisable” due to mass migration. But in a classic Trump “weave” of escalating threats followed by a last-minute climbdown, he lifted the threat of sanctions and military action to seize Greenland by force.
For the rest of the non-western world, this sudden awakening must be galling. After all, it was not Trump’s push to take over Greenland that finally dismantled the international rules-based system created after World War Two. It was Gaza.
Gaza and the end of the ‘rules-based order’
Carney, as the leader of a major western country backing Israel’s genocide, helped bury it. Now he has eloquently declared it dead. He even admitted in his Davos speech that the rules were never for everyone. That they were, in part, a convenient facade for western powers.
“We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigour, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
Now western countries are getting a taste of what the rest of the world has been living with for decades
“This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security…”
And so, Carney admits what many already knew. The rules didn’t apply to much of the Global South – from Palestine, to Venezuela, Iran to West Papua – anywhere where western economic interests wished to seize control of resources, or where people refused subordination to US diktat.
And Washington’s allies had no problem with backing US aggression and brutal sanctions for countries outside the blessed circle of Europe and the G7.
Six months ago Carney was telling Christiane Amanpour on CNN that after two years of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, what was needed was a “Zionist Palestinian state living side by side with Israel”. The people whose children and loved ones had been systematically slaughtered, their homes and institutions destroyed, their land and villages annexed, should live willingly under the rule of their oppressor. This is the very opposite of the rule of law, it is the rule of the bully.
Carney was part of the western pro-Israel alliance that gave the apartheid state a blank cheque to commit crimes against humanity and genocide, shredding whatever pretence of a rules-based order was left in 2023.
As a Palestinian American wrote on X: “For two years, the Western world didn’t merely fail to restrain Israel; it funded it, armed it, vetoed accountability, rewrote legal standards in real time, and criminalized dissent at home. International law was selectively suspended, not overwhelmed like some people want to say, and once legality becomes conditional, the concept itself ceases to exist.”
Trump has now torn off the last of the tattered, bloodstained facade of the system, sanctioning the International Criminal Court over its charges against Israeli leaders, and defunding UN institutions.
Now western countries are getting a taste of what the rest of the world has been living with for decades.
New alliances
What this means is that all existing alliances and relationships are up for grabs, and new, surprising ones are emerging.
In China last week, Carney told President Xi Jinping that their new bilateral trade pact was the beginning of a new era of relations. “The partnership we’ve built sets us up well for the new world order,” he said.
Carney said the multilateral system of trade governed by the World Trade Organization and Trans-Pacific Partnership, and the rules-based order of the UN, WHO and Cop climate agreements was being “eroded and undercut”.
China was a more stable, predictable bet than Trump’s USA. The new trade pact with Beijing will include “clean energy, conventional energy, evolution of the global financial system, and cross-border payments… Rather than these being developed through the IMF and WTO and other multilateral organisations, it is going to be coalitions who develop them,” he said.
‘Board of Peace’: Trump is running Gaza, and the world, like a mafia boss
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In other words, Trump’s threats pushed Canada into the arms of Beijing to reduce its dependence on US trade.
Meanwhile, the rapid redrawing of alliances is also happening in the Middle East.
Old rivals such as Turkey and Saudi Arabia are drawing closer, while former allies the UAE and Saudi Arabia are now on opposite sides of a struggle for regional supremacy. How far this struggle will go is not yet known, with its effects already affecting Yemen, Sudan and Somalia, and putting the UAE’s regional alliances of proxy forces, built over 15 years, in great jeopardy.
In Saudi Arabia, where Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had banned expressions of support for Palestine at the start of the genocide in Gaza, state media are now openly attacking Israel, Zionism and the Abraham Accords. In Mecca last Friday, the imam of the Grand Mosque prayed for victory for Palestine and the defeat of the “Zionist occupiers”. Israel should be worried.
In post-Assad Syria, the US dropped its alliance with the Kurdish-led SDF, and backed the government of President Ahmed al-Sharaa as his forces seized back all the lands and oil fields previously controlled by the US-backed group. Once again, the Kurds know that their only friend is the mountains.
Replacing the UN
For Palestinians, the genocide has not ended, but instead entered a new phase under Trump’s Gaza Executive Board.
The same old discredited figures who made a mockery of the rules-based order, such as Tony Blair and US Secretary of State Mark Rubio, alongside US Zionist billionaires including Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, and Marc Rowan, have been made colonial governors of Gaza. Meanwhile Israel continues to besiege and attack Palestinians across the occupied territories.
Beyond Gaza, Trump’s Board of Peace appears to be a new US model of rules-free governance to replace the United Nations; a system established to prevent aggression and uphold human rights in the wake of the Holocaust. That history has been binned. The board’s charter gives Trump executive powers as chair, allowing him to appoint and remove member states. Global governance as corporate takeover.
China may still be the hegemon in waiting, but it is not ready to step into the mayhem that Trump’s chaos, Putin’s war and Netanyahu’s expansionist dreams have created
So far, states agreeing to join the board are mainly from the Middle East and Asia. They include Israel, Turkey, Egypt, Pakistan, Qatar, Morocco, Vietnam, Belarus, Hungary and Kazakhstan, while western nations do not want to be on a body that Russia has been invited to join. Putin has yet to reply.
Slovenia’s Prime Minister Robert Golob said the board “dangerously interferes with the broader international order”.
A new order is emerging, with rapid shifts towards novel bilateral relations and alliances. China may still be the hegemon in waiting, but it is not ready to step into the mayhem that Trump’s chaos, Putin’s war in Ukraine and Netanyahu’s expansionist dreams have created.
Power is draining away from the global institutions that once governed international relations. As Carney put it: “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
Before the last US presidential election I wagered that a Trump victory would ultimately be beneficial for the world for one reason only: the brutal policies he would pursue would accelerate the collapse of the US empire.
Friends looked shocked at the idea. But today, just over a year later, that collapse looks closer.
The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Eye.
