By Michael W. Manulak

July 20, 2026

Davos was on edge. Days earlier, U.S. President Donald Trump had sharply escalated his threats to annex Greenland and punish any nation that stood in his way.

Meanwhile, military personnel from several NATO countries had arrived in the Arctic territory for Exercise Arctic Endurance, hastily organized at Denmark’s request. Was a shooting war within NATO no longer unthinkable?

With Trump due to address the World Economic Forum (WEF) on January 21st, speculation swirled at the Swiss resort. What would the president say—and could the alliance survive the confrontation?

As it turned out, it wasn’t the speech of the president of the United States that was the major takeaway from Davos.

The previous evening, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney had offered his answer to the political crisis unfolding around him — and to the breakdown that it exposed. Standing before the luminous blue WEF backdrop, Carney began: “Today, I’ll talk about a rupture in the world order.” His cadence sharpened. “We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy.”

Carney named his alternative: “value-based realism,” crediting Finnish President Alexander Stubb with the concept. Canada would be both “principled and pragmatic,” he declared. It would be committed to fundamental principles, but “clear-eyed” in its willingness to work with partners that did not share its values. He received a rare standing ovation. Carney had struck a chord.

The label values-based realism is new, though its ingredients are familiar: it is an effort to balance principles and interests. Stubb calls for governments to stand by core values, such as democracy and human rights, while recognizing the need to work with governments that do not hold to those ideas.

Six months later, Carney and Stubb have elaborated their concept into something resembling a foreign policy doctrine in a recent essay for The Economist titled Prepare for a world of ad hoc coalitions.

They are among the most conspicuous voices in support of a wider idea taking hold in Western capitals: that universal institutions, especially the United Nations, are increasingly unequal to the multipolar moment and that flexible, ad hoc coalitions of the willing offer a more realistic response.

This argument, however, rests on a false choice. Multilateralism is not—and never has been—based only on hopefulness or idealism. Effective multilateralism is not an alternative to the pursuit of the national interest. It is a means of organizing power and resources to achieve it.

A Category Error

In their article, Carney and Stubb reject both “wishful multilateralism” and “cold realpolitik,” preferring adaptable, ad- hoc coalitions organized to safeguard shared interests. The post-1945 world order is unravelling quickly, they observe, and the institutions at the centre of that order are ill-prepared to avert the decline.

In a world shifting toward multipolarity, powers such as Canada and Finland can respond best through weaving dense, plurilateral webs of connection among different configurations of states on specific issues.

The Carney-Stubb prescription has real resonance. They are right to be concerned about the serious economic disruption and threats it poses to continued prosperity. Values-based realism seems to offer the best of all worlds: prosperity and security without compromising deeply held values. Carney and Stubb are at the forefront of thinking on reshaping the Western alliance system.

Yet, their analysis rests on what philosophers call a category error. They place realpolitik in opposition to multilateralism, then describe the world as moving away from multilateralism toward multipolarity. These comparisons are fallacious, grouping concepts belonging to different logical categories.

Realism offers an account of power and interests; realpolitik is its practical idiom. Multilateralism, in contrast, is a way of organizing relations among governments. Multipolarity describes the distribution of power among states. A multipolar order can be governed multilaterally, as it often has been throughout history.

And plurilateralism is not an alternative to multilateralism. It is multilateralism conducted among a more limited grouping of states.

Carney and Stubb are not just comparing apples and oranges. They are comparing entirely different food groups.

Nor is variable geometry a new phenomenon produced by multipolarity. As Felicity Vabulas and Duncan Snidal have shown, the sharpest growth in the number of informal intergovernmental organizations started in the 1990s. Rather than a response to multipolarity, as Carney and Stubb suggest, this research shows institutional informality grew most sharply during the years of unipolarity.

The True Values-Based Realists

These distinctions are not merely logical or semantic. By treating multilateralism as a values-centered alternative to realism, Carney and Stubb misrepresent multilateralism.

Values, such as human rights and the peaceful settlement of disputes, are indeed central to the United Nations Charter. But the heart of multilateralism is, and has always been, mutual benefit among states. Cooperation should not be mistaken for harmony. Compliance with international law is sustained chiefly by enlightened self-interest and often reinforced by verification mechanisms to guard against cheating.

The characterization of multilateralism as “wishful” fundamentally misrepresents the subject, framing it as more idealistic than pragmatic.

The UN, and its predecessor, the League of Nations, were forged in the aftermath of the two most destructive wars the world has ever known. The designers of these organizations were not naïve. They had just prosecuted brutal wars through the most brutal means imaginable. They had formed alliances of necessity with those with whom they disagreed. Rather than altruism, they put their own countries and their own peoples first. The international organizations they created were means of advancing the national interest.

The principal architects of the UN Charter were under no illusions about the moral rectitude of their partners. U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill collaborated closely with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. “Uncle Joe” had, to name just one example, been responsible for the “Holodomor” of 1932-1933, the massive, engineered famine in Ukraine that resulted in as many as five million deaths by starvation.

In 1941, on acquiring Stalin as a strange bedfellow, Churchill quipped: “If Hitler invaded hell, I would make at least a favourable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.” They were nothing if not clear-eyed.

Roosevelt and Churchill did not merely cooperate with Stalin to win the war. They then worked closely with him to construct the United Nations. Their realism led them to multilateralism, not away from it. They realized that isolation and national armaments were no guarantee of security, and that collective security provided a pragmatic means of preventing another World War.

The organization they built was set up to mobilize preponderant force against international aggression. It was created for the task of deterring and defeating future equivalents of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. The United Nations did not assume that norms and values could substitute for power; it combined right with might in defence of common rules. It is only on this secure foundation that values can flourish.

The Clear-Eyed Case for Multilateralism

The United Nations is, today, an embattled institution. It is underestimated, underfunded, and under attack. Governments have failed to use it in the way that its founders intended. Meanwhile, the use of force and territorial aggression are spreading. The best response by middle powers — including Canada and Finland — to a changing world order would be to reinforce multilateral structures badly in need of support. Rather than dispersing their efforts among dozens of plurilateral initiatives, they should direct that political energy toward making multilateralism work.

Reinvigorating the UN’s peace and security role will not be easy. It will require collaboration from many of the governments acting to weaken multilateralism today. But that is not an argument for abandonment. Middle powers cannot compel great powers to support their efforts, but neither are they powerless.

Focused middle-power engagement could do much to reinforce the UN’s weakened peace and security role. There are historical precedents. In the late 1990s, Canada played an entrepreneurial part in assembling a cross-regional coalition and jolting the UN system into adopting the policy prism of “human security.”

The results strengthened multilateralism: the Ottawa landmines treaty, the creation of the International Criminal Court (ICC), and the commission that developed the Responsibility to Protect (R2P) principle. Finland likewise made conflict prevention and human security central to its international engagement.

Middle powers can play a lead role again, in reenvisioning the UN’s value as an institution of collective security. With respect for the territorial integrity of states under intense challenge and International Humanitarian Law increasingly under attack, the time is ripe for the world to bolster the peace and security mandate of the UN.

Canada, Finland, and other middle powers should work together in a concerted fashion to enhance the UN’s role in conflict prevention by building coalitions, putting new ideas about peace and security on the agenda, providing reliable financial support, and defending the independence of international officials.

As Canada and other NATO members have increased their military preparedness, they should pledge a portion of their new capacity to UN collective security and UN-authorized peace operations. A carefully defined pledge of personnel, logistics, strategic lift, engineering, and medical support would reinforce the UN’s capacity to act. Such a commitment would speak loudly in New York.

A recovery of the UN’s security role is not simply a values-based proposition. Ongoing violence in Ukraine, the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere has created a destabilizing dynamic implicating the interests of all states. The breakdown of stability in one part of the world cannot be ring-fenced and halted there. The growing breakdown of the international security order is of fundamental importance to all countries.

To be sure, it may sometimes be necessary to pursue this objective in parallel with established institutions. The Ottawa landmines process followed this trajectory. Carney and Stubb’s article makes a similar point, if not in the way they intend: the “coalition of the willing” assembled to support Ukraine relies heavily on NATO’s institutional machinery and derives its legal justification from the UN Charter’s prohibition on the use of force.

When and where it is necessary to work through coalitions alongside existing institutions, such efforts should aim primarily at strengthening multilateralism, rather than sidestepping it.

But plurilateral efforts are no substitute for reinforcing the main international bulwark against a resurgence of international aggression and territorial conquest: the UN. Plurilateral institutions can provide a measure of governance in defined areas of international life, but rely on a larger international infrastructure for their foundation and effectiveness.

Carney and Stubb are correct in asserting that reform is important for strengthening multilateralism into the future. Yet, by insisting on the need for reform, especially to the UN Security Council, they risk downplaying the responsibility and agency of governments in making multilateralism work today.

A Way Forward

Mark Carney and Alexander Stubb are right that the old order cannot and should not carry on unchanged. Middle powers must be part of the solution. But what they propose should not be treated as an alternative to multilateralism. Values-based realism, as Carney and Stubb construct it, is the logic of multilateralism, properly understood: governments organizing power and resources behind common institutions in service of shared and long-term national interests. It is the thinking of Roosevelt, Churchill, and other architects of the interwar and postwar order.

Rebuilding multilateralism should not wait for the end of the Trump administration or for a grand bargain over UN Security Council reform. If governments too often treat the UN as a forum for declarations of principle rather than for action, it is because they have chosen not to use the powers available to them.

Preparing the United Nations for a more dangerous, multipolar world must begin today.

Michael W. Manulak is Associate Professor at the Norman Paterson School of International Affairs, Carleton University. He is author of the forthcoming book The Ghost in Geneva: The Untold History of the League of Nations—And Why it Matters Now.