By Lisa Van Dusen

March 26, 2026

I once predicted semi-seriously in a long-ago column that climate change and calm — or a combination of temperature and temperament — would eventually make Canada a 21st-century superpower.

Donald Trump may have achieved it in half the time.

The term “New World Order” went viral not long after the dawn of 2026, when Prime Minister Mark Carney used it to describe a new reality produced by the rupture in the old one caused by America’s status as an anti-democracy force multiplier based on the role its president plays as a chaos actor (not in so many words).

Carney used the term during a meeting in Beijing with Premier Li Qiang to frame Canada’s rapprochement with China as a safe-haven strategy in the face of America’s transition from unipolar democratic superpower to world’s number-one irrational, predatory hegemon (not in so many words).

Since then, following Carney’s Davos speech and in the face of confusion about precisely what the New World Order is, the composition of its membership, and whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, the term has receded somewhat from the headlines.

This reflects a world in transition. For the decade during which I’ve been using it as a columnist and editor per both experience and observation, the term “New World Order” has described the geopolitical, political and intelligence forces who’ve been waging a global war on democracy as a means of replacing the liberal world order with one less prohibitive and more amenable to their interests. Part of our current confusion stems from the question of whether the United States is now part of that order.

Under Donald Trump, it unabashedly is.

If you’re accustomed to sorting power based on the Freedom House, (Freedom in the World Report 2026: The Growing Shadow of Autocracy) Economist (2026 Democracy Index not out yet) and other governance rankings that have tracked the migration of full democracies into the fragile democracy, failed democracy, and autocracy ranks over the past two decades, you might assume the New World Order is a label that kicks in when the country-count balance of that evolution tilts away from the longstanding democracy-led, liberal status quo toward corruption-captured, surveillance-state autocracies and performative democracies using lip service to distract from a heist in progress.

We’re still used to thinking of balance of power in terms of the same territorial delineations that, at least nominally, distinguished the U.S.-led democratic/capitalist good guys from the Soviet totalitarian/communist bad guys during the Cold War: East vs. West with a Venn overlap of non-aligned countries and up-for-grabs, jump-ball states where the murkiest spy rivalries of fiction unfolded between burnt-out cases toiling in the chiaroscuro, coated in tropical sweat and Silk Cut residue.

That’s not how power works in the 21st century. And, it’s definitely not how espionage works (one of the recurring mysteries surrounding the unsavoury saga of social entrepreneur and incrimination curator Jeffrey Epstein is whether he was a spy. It’s such a quaint, 20th-century question).

It’s less about territory than it used to be, and it’s more about outcomes than territory. Those outcomes sometimes but not always include a flip in systemic affiliation when a high-value election victory is secured that has implications for drastic, otherwise implausible change.

The best part of this scenario is imagining the This Hour has 22 Minutes sketch of Mark McKinney as Carney apologizing to the world on behalf of Canada for becoming an accidental superpower: ‘We are soooo sorry. It just kinda…happened?’.

The New World Order is not a Cold War-style entity because this is not 1970, and the main power distinction between then and now is the transformative role of the internet in politics, covert operations, collusion, propaganda, surveillance, hacking, and corruption and how the possibilities of that technological revolution enabled this geopolitical one at the dawn of this century.

Which creates an opening for the New New World Order that Carney has envisioned of middle powers taking an off-ramp from the parade of geopolitical and institutional violations waged by the world’s predatory hegemons to reconstitute a saner arrangement in the rational-power vacuum that their rampage has created.

This has already begun, with Canada’s trade, security and diplomatic diversification strategy producing a series of Comprehensive Strategic Partnerships and deepened trade and defence alliances from Australia to Mexico to the European Union to the Nordic countries.

This shift in power from the New World Order to the New New World Order represents an overdue transition — from a world besieged by geopolitical thuggery, institutional sabotage, economic and military bullying, contempt for diplomacy, industrialized mendacity, strategic corruption, and narrative warfare — to something that can, ideally, salvage the best of the postwar order while disposing of its hacked and degraded baggage.

With the Davos speech and in his subsequent international diplomacy and policy shifts, Carney has already tacitly claimed the mantle of leadership of the Sane World Order.

As a former central banker in both Canada and the U.K., as an expert in both global finance and economics at a time when Trump is just one example of how economic warfare is waged, and as the institutional fire chief who ran the Financial Stability Board in the wake of the 2008 cataclysm, Carney has the international credibility to back up that claim, which seems absolutely fine with his interlocutors. “Given the alternative” doesn’t quite go without saying here.

Having witnessed the behavioural effects produced by a quarter-century of corrupt, covert and overt power consolidation on the part of the world’s three biggest military hegemons — the United States, Russia, and China — humanity may be ready for an alternative superpower arrangement based on intellectual capital, uncorrupted intelligence, geopolitical sanity, political stability, economic predictability, and a return to the rule of law.

And if Carney is the Sane World Order’s calm, rational, dare-we-say-technocratic leader, could Canada be its default superpower?

The best part of this far-fetched scenario is imagining the This Hour has 22 Minutes sketch of Mark McKinney as Carney apologizing to the world on behalf of Canada for becoming an accidental superpower (“We are soooo sorry. It just kinda…happened?”).

Still, if the definition of a superpower weren’t evolving, America’s status as one would still be intact.

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.