By Aftab Ahmed

January 23, 2026

Mark Carney’s Davos speech of January 20th has been dubbed a manifesto of free people, a doctrine, and a eulogy for a ruptured international system. Its framing posits a grim diagnosis: the rules-based order is on life support, nearing its demise.

A more ominous interpretation is that the order is already dead, and that the time of that death is being recorded belatedly.

But a definitive verdict may be premature on three fronts: 1) Whether Mark Carney’s speech will sway middle powers to lean into the geopolitical direction he set out, 2) What policy substance sits behind his clarion call, and, 3) The extent to which the great powers he called out will respond.

Still, Carney’s speech does read like a generational reckoning that captures the present as it is, rather than as it was or should be: vividly, candidly, without fear, and with strategic weight.

The world heard the Canadian prime minister and detected a possibility: Carney is perhaps the kind of global statesman who can rally middle powers against expansionist hegemons – to use his words – determined to remake the world solely on their own terms.

The venue helped. Davos is Carney’s home turf: the World Economic Forum is a summit of elites he knows how to read, put at ease, unsettle, and pitch to. He speaks Davos’ dialect better than most: it is about markets, leverage, risk, and the fine print of economic statecraft.

A display of acumen lay in what the speech refused to be: no sentimental defence of a multilateral system that once served Canada well and which Canada supported in return. At its core, the speech was righteous, calculated, and unusually blunt – especially for the leader of a G7 country – about what has changed.

The decision to use the phrase American hegemony landed with a jolt. Many of us born in the 1990s came of age believing democracy was where bets should be placed – we were socialized to stand behind liberal-democratic leaders in the West against authoritarianism.

A parallel sentiment has lingered since we first stepped into adulthood and began to see, without illusion, how the world actually works: frustration that those same leaders seldom challenge allies for the very tactics they denounced in their adversaries.

That is why Carney’s message rang like a bracing dose of candour: Canada benefited from the old world order, and so it learned to tolerate its flaws, looking the other way when global standards and codes of conduct tilted toward, or were biased in favour of, the West at the expense of smaller, economically or militarily weaker nations, or were not enforced uniformly.

That recognition sits at the core of five key messages from his speech that resonated with me.

First, the rules-based order no longer restrains the strong and mighty. The longstanding wager that the old order would protect middle powers, much less the developing world, no longer holds, and acting as if it still does only makes countries easier to intimidate when Donald Trump’s America, for instance, exploits its rapidly diminishing superpower status to bully smaller countries.

Second, economic interdependence has been weaponized by great powers as an instrument of intimidation and, at times, coercion. Tariffs, sanctions, and supply-chain choke points now come with implied threats, designed to extract unreasonable concessions, including on triangulated files, from other countries.

Third, the temptation to retreat into complete self-sufficiency or isolationism is understandable, but risky. It will raise the cost of running the global economy, slow economic growth, and leave countries more fragile and more prone to cascading crises.

Fourth, middle powers cannot keep negotiating in seclusion, each courting great powers for a fair deal in a world that offers no guarantee of fairness. Collective bargaining is the optimal alternative to being played off against one another indefinitely.

Fifth, credibility is leverage. If Canada denounces strong-arming only when it comes from rivals, its well-established reputation for moral leadership will come across as situational and self-serving, and it will lose its currency.

These key messages felt like an overdue recognition for the millennial generation. My generation’s political temperament has been shaped by a sense of frustration: the international institutional guardrails we were taught would keep great powers in check proved far less durable in practice.

Those guardrails bent under pressure, and ultimately cracked.

As children, millennials absorbed a story of stability. The post-Cold War period carried an assumption: the biggest arguments between great powers were settled, a winner had been declared, democracy had prevailed, globalization was a one-way road, shared prosperity would deepen, and even authoritarian societies would, slowly but surely, democratize.

Our cynicism has not curdled into full-blown apathy. Compared with many in Gen Z, millennials are more inclined to believe that public institutions can be repaired and redesigned, not simply consigned to the annals of history.

I experienced the post-Cold War era growing up in Bangladesh: a country that swung between military rule, authoritarianism, and brief democratic openings, even as its people’s unfinished destination remains a liberal democracy. That aspiration is tied, in part, to Bangladesh’s economic journey.

The textile products Bangladesh makes are sold, in large volumes, to European and American markets. That export model is a product of free-market economics. At the household level, labour migration to the Middle East and East Asia, and the remittances it generates, have also been an economic engine.

The prevailing sentiment I witnessed as a child was that the liberal economic order Bangladesh plugged into in the early 1990s, which enabled the international mobility of our goods and workers, was one the country benefited from, on balance.

A natural affinity hardened in my mind: liberal democracy, as the political system associated with that economic order, carried more appeal than authoritarianism and economic nationalism. Canada represented the very best of what a liberal democracy could be, so my parents believed I would have a fair shot at life if I studied here and eventually settled here. So here I am.

With time, as I grew older, that story evolved. The 2008 financial crisis, democratic backsliding, climate emergencies, the pandemic, the return of war in the Middle East, Europe, and Africa as facts of life, and the steady erosion of the rules-based order rewired millennials’ assumptions.

The result was a blend of vestigial optimism and experience-bred cynicism.

That experience also changed how we relate to institutions. Blind trust in public institutions, domestic or foreign, became hard to justify. The war on terror, Occupy Wall Street, the rise of social media, and state-capacity failures during the pandemic taught us to question large institutions that demand legitimacy while too often failing at the basics of accountability.

The failure of multiple institutions, American and multinational, to rein in Donald Trump’s abuses of power has compounded our mistrust. But our cynicism has not curdled into full-blown apathy. Compared with many in Gen Z, millennials are more inclined to believe that public institutions can be repaired and redesigned, not simply consigned to the annals of history.

Progress also stopped feeling permanent. Human rights expanded with democracy after the fall of the Soviet Union, then met backlash. Global public health achievements were laudable, but increasingly became political hot-potato issues.

As the chaos of the post-Obama era preoccupied governments via a permanent polycrisis, the UN’s Millennium Development Goals gave way to the Sustainable Development Goals, which then faded from the global policy radar.

The lesson was not that progress is impossible, but that it is reversible, and therefore requires a global citizenry that stays alert rather than complacent.

That worldview has tended to produce a politics that demands practicality rather than partisan orthodoxy. The past few years, in particular, have left millennials more anxious about the future and more allergic to slogans from both the political left and the right.

A commitment to fairness still runs through millennials, but so does fatigue. Calls for a just society still carry importance. Human dignity does, too. Yet algorithm-driven outrage, purity spirals, and endless moral scoring on social media have left many of us craving something simpler, authentic, and more direct: a society that is both fair and functional. In essence, a pluralistic society that works.

Carney’s speech landed as a signal that someone in a position of power was finally speaking of the world millennials have come to recognize. Three elements, specifically, fed that feeling of being heard:

One was the refusal to romanticize the past. Carney did not pretend the old order was virtuous. He conceded, plainly, that much of the Western world lived with its paradoxes because, on balance, the advantages of the status quo outweighed its costs: a net-benefit calculus.

His tone was not penitential. It was matter-of-fact, and it carried the authority of someone who tried to make the international system work from the inside and who now accepts that the system itself is done.

A second was the insistence that the present threat of renewed great-power rivalry can be treated as an opportunity to define what comes next. A new order, in this telling, is not fated to be written by great powers alone. A middle-power order is at least imaginable.

A third was the argument that international institutions remain significant, but that the locus of initiative has to shift. The era of hegemons setting the terms and conditions, and everyone else following through, has become a cul-de-sac: the centre of gravity needs to move toward middle-power collaboration, rather than Washington, Beijing, or Moscow dictating what must happen and everyone else picking sides.

Carney’s diagnosis of the failures of his generation resonated with mine. It deserves to be taken seriously.

Policy Contributing Writer Aftab Ahmed is a policy development officer with the City of Toronto and an MPP graduate of the Max bell School of Public Policy at McGill University. He is a columnist for the Bangladeshi newspapers The Daily Star and Dhaka Tribune. The views expressed in this article are personal opinions and do not reflect the views or opinions of any organization, institution, or entity associated with the author.