By Lisa Van Dusen

January 19, 2026

As Donald Trump prepares to invade Davos as a possible prelude to invading Greenland, the world is reeling from a 2026 already fraught with previously unimaginable headlines. This escalated Trumpian assault on reality — complete with a tariff-coercion twist —  has produced a range of responses, including from Canada.

In his meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang on January 15th in Beijing, Prime Minister Mark Carney said three words that carried both disproportionate value to his host and asymmetrical impact beyond the room.

In describing the recent evolution of what had been Canada’s most tense bilateral relationship of the past decade during the open portion of the delegations meeting in the Great Hall of the People, Carney said: “I believe the progress that we have made in the partnership sets us up well for the new world order.”

What immediately swung the global klieg light to this quote was not just the last three words of the sentence, but the way in which they were delivered, with the staccato punctuation of “period-paired words”, i.e. sporting stylistic periods for emphasis, as in: “New. World. Order.”

It was a powerful clip, made only slightly less so because it wasn’t delivered the next day in Carney’s bilateral with President Xi Jinping.

This is certainly not the first time that Carney has referred to the upheaval in the postwar, liberal, democracy-led, rules-based, multilateral (build your own adjective salad) global order since he became prime minister last April. The subject has been the invisible guest at the G7, G20, NATO, UNGA, APEC, ASEAN, and other international gatherings of the past nine months.

Its domination of diplomatic discussion has been helpfully corroborated by Donald Trump’s hourly, frenemy-fire assaults on the U.S.-led geopolitical status quo in a marathon of superpower deflation so exhaustively self-destructive its rap sheet cannot possibly be listed in its entirety in this space.

Indeed, it represents the first time a dominant power is “voluntarily abandoning its leadership”, per Ed Luce’s recent piece in the Financial Times, How to de-risk from America. (As an editor, I’d tweak that “abandoning” to “degrading” as the more accurate, proactive descriptor and my own preferred euphemism over the past decade for what Trump is doing to America).

The key, previous articulations of Carney’s world-order view since his defence and security speech at the Munk School last June have been: his speech to the Council on Foreign Relations last September 22, which introduced the marquee quote, “This is not a transition; this a rupture” along with a swipe at the concept of “variable geometry”; and, a November 12th Economist essay elaborating on variable geometry titled The world is in a new age of variable geometry, says Mark Carney. In it, Carney espoused a shift from the debris field of hacked and obstructed multilateralism to a “plurilateralism” defined by “dynamic, overlapping, pragmatic” coalitions.

The New World Order is not an abstract notion in the process of being refined on its way to a hashtag and a headquarters. And it’s not half of a geopolitical bifurcation between nice governments and mean governments, or sane governments and insane ones.

All of which sounds entirely sensible — especially as an answer to Canada’s unprecedented, Trump-rationalized trade torment — but for two small cautions.

The first is that this is a transition, not a rupture, because the undermining of the U.S.-led global order isn’t a new phenomenon. It’s not even a new Trumpian phenomenon. The war on democracy, which has defined the protracted power consolidation stylings, overt and covert, that now enable anyone to pronounce the advent of a New World Order, has been underway for more than two decades.

Indeed, I’m no psychic and I’ve been writing about it for years, having first started using the term “New World Order” in columns in 2017 as the most accurate way to describe the well-documented trend of democracies tumbling into autocracy across the world, pushed by both debt-trapping and the corruption that comes with it, and the technology-enabled, borderless, uberscaling of narrative warfare — the post-internet iteration of the tactical fictionalization first made famous by intelligence agencies and John Le Carré during the Cold War.

The second asterisk is that the geometry of that process has been invariable.

As more countries have become autocracies — a phenomenon catalogued by Anne Applebaum in her book Autocracy, Inc. — America’s power has predictably declined and China’s has risen, a geopolitical Trading Places plot set in motion with China’s accession to the WTO in 2001, accelerated by Beijing’s massive cyberpoaching of intellectual property as industrial strategy throughout the 2000s, and rendered all-but frictionless by the regrettable absence of the intelligence community from the case — a problem best summed up by the fact that the most well-funded, technologically omniscient covert operations behemoth in the history of espionage was able to save America from Osama bin Laden but not from Donald J. Trump, of all people.

Autocrats prefer to answer to autocratic masters, without any moral or ethical strings — especially pesky human rights protections — attached. Leaders who don’t depend on the approval of voters for their power see human beings as a crowd-control issue, the rule of law as an existential threat, and multilateralism, like un-corrupted legislatures, as inconvenient oversight.

The leaders of the countries along China’s Belt and Road have made accommodations to democracy degradation and vast resource exploitation to meet what The Financial Times 24 hours ago called Beijing’s surging “global resources grab”, which China sees as key to national self-reliance and long-term social stability, per both the economic truism — due any day now for a 21st-century surveillance-state debunking — “When the people go hungry, governments topple”, and China’s motto of “Stability over everything”, or weiwen, firmly in place since Tiananmen Square.

Trump is uncharacteristically unfazed by Canada’s rapprochement with China because Trump is a reality-show autocrat, not — whatever else he says about China within the tsunami of lies that hourly misrepresents his presidency — Beijing’s adversary. His assault on the treaty-bound, global trade regime and the supply chains that define it, his latest attack on NATO from within, his obliteration of constitutional domestic norms and multilateral international ones, his non-stop debasement of America and democracy by making both seem dysfunctional and dangerous, all attest to that.

The proposition that it seriously elevates China — which shouldn’t have to rely on a human wrecking ball for contrast — is as rational as the ill-fated conventional wisdom that Trump’s operatic unelectability guaranteed an outcome in the 2016 presidential election.

The New World Order is not an abstract notion in the process of being refined on its way to a hashtag and a headquarters. And it’s not half of a geopolitical bifurcation between either nice governments and mean governments, or sane and insane ones. It is the newly expanded autocratic world, as opposed to the actively shrunken democratic one it claims to now fatefully dominate in its latest, most sweeping embrace of the fait accomplit propaganda gambit, and, in the case of Trump’s re-weaponization, the trolling of the world from the White House with a horror show utterly contemptuous of its audience.

Which means, in the end, it may be that turning to China — especially based on an otherwise ridiculous narrative that compels democracies to turn to China — is more akin to cutting out the middleman than the lesser of two evils.

Policy Editor and Publisher Lisa Van Dusen has served as Washington bureau chief for Sun Media, Washington Columnist for the Ottawa Citizen, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.