JANUARY 22 — Davos is the perfect place for geopolitical revelations. It’s where Western leaders talk about global solidarity over poached turbot and where middle powers discover structural truths decades after Africans and Asians lived them in their budgets. When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared this week that the “rules-based order has ruptured” and that middle powers must band together to rebuild it, the applause was instant from Ottawa to Canberra. To many, it felt like Canada had finally found its voice.

Much of the Global South, however, heard something different. Not a bold new vision, but confirmation that the West is only now waking up to the vulnerabilities it long prescribed to others.

Carney warned that integration has become a source of subordination, that supply chains are now weapons, and that the old order has broken down. Africans could have told him that twenty years ago. For most of the Global South, integration was always conditional, and the rules-based order was never truly rules-based; it was a hierarchy enforced through finance, commodities, and multilateral institutions headquartered safely in the North.

Africa has lived this order for decades

Take Ghana. For two decades it was held up as proof that liberalisation and democratic consolidation could deliver growth. Then the Eurobond market closed, dollars dried up, and sovereign debt restructuring arrived with the familiar imprint of the International Monetary Fund. Access to global capital turned into exposure; exposure turned into conditionality. Integration was never free.

Zambia has learned the same lesson through a different mechanism. Its restructuring has become a diplomatic wrestling match between Chinese, Western, and multilateral creditors. Not because the rules are unclear, but because the rules were never written to constrain the powerful. When the debtor is African, the rules are binding; when the creditor is Western or Chinese, the rules are negotiable.

Kenya’s Standard Gauge Railway tells another story. In Western capitals it was treated as evidence of Beijing’s predatory lending. In Kenya it was understood as hedging: using Chinese financing and capacity when Western institutions refused to build. When Africans play great powers against each other, it is called dependency; when Scandinavians do it, it is called strategic autonomy.

Nigeria’s struggles are not ideological but monetary. Bread, diesel, and the dollar have become the true instruments of sovereignty. Western economists deride subsidies as distortions; Nigerian politicians understand them as political stability in a country where sudden price spikes can end governments. Carney speaks of sovereignty in terms of submarines and critical minerals; Nigeria practices it through FX policy and fuel.

The Democratic Republic of Congo sits on the minerals that will power the green transition — cobalt for batteries, copper for electrification. Western governments demand clean, ethical supply chains while insisting that value-added processing remain in Europe and North America. ESG becomes the new language of exclusion; Africa’s minerals are welcome, Africa’s industry less so.

And then there is food. The Sahel has learned that wheat cargoes from Russia, Turkey, and the Gulf are more strategically consequential than speeches about values. In much of Africa, alignment now follows the bakery schedule, not the security council.

South Africa’s position is more sophisticated still. Its engagement with BRICS is not romantic anti-Westernism but insurance. The West is no longer the only lender, no longer the only military guarantor, no longer the only technological hub. Pretending otherwise is nostalgia masquerading as statecraft.

Canada’s myth of innocence

Carney’s speech also reveals a persistent myth in Canadian foreign policy: that Canada joined the postwar order but did not shape it; that we benefited from its public goods, but never from its asymmetries. Canadians like to imagine themselves as peacekeepers and conciliators, benign to the core. But Africa remembers the mining concessions, the arbitration law firms in London, and Export Development Canada’s enthusiastic financing of extractive ventures. Canada’s mining presence on the continent is not small. Nor is its position on IMF creditor committees. Canada has never had to take IMF medicine, only administer it.

Carney listed an extensive network of new bilateral and plurilateral partnerships — with Europe, China, the Gulf, Asean, Mercosur. Africa did not appear once. Middle-power coalition building sounds inclusive until one sees who is invited to the table and who is treated as an export market.

Asean has been doing this for half a century

Carney’s discovery of middle-power coalition building also overlooks South-east Asia, which mastered hedging long before Nato termed it “strategic autonomy.” The Bandung Conference of 1955 launched the non-aligned movement and laid the foundations for what Asean perfected through quiet diplomacy: refusing to be absorbed into someone else’s rivalry.

Indonesia’s nickel export ban is a case study in modern sovereignty. Instead of accepting Western warnings about investment climate, Jakarta forced Chinese, Western, and Gulf firms to invest in downstream capacity. Vietnam has built a semiconductor adjacency without becoming a security dependent of either Washington or Beijing. Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand have accepted that the world is transactional and multipolar; the West is still mourning the passing of unipolarity.

To many in South-east Asia, Carney’s speech felt like a late arrival to a conversation the region has been having since the 1960s. Middle powers do not need permission to hedge. They need capacity.

What Carney gets right — and what he misses

Carney is correct that the old order has ruptured. He is right that values without capacity mean little, that trade corridors have become strategic assets, that finance can coerce as effectively as missiles, and that no middle power can negotiate alone with a hegemon without ending up on the menu.

But what he misses is that the order he wants to rebuild was never neutral. It was hierarchical for most of the world. The rules constrained Africans and South-east Asians while exempting those who wrote them. Conditionality, not solidarity, was the logic of Bretton Woods. When Europeans and North Americans speak as if the order has only recently become transactional, the developing world hears selective amnesia.

A hopeful ending for Canada

None of this means Canada is condemned to irrelevance. On the contrary, Canada may be better positioned than many Western states to adapt — if it abandons its innocence narrative and accepts that the next order will not be written in Davos or Ottawa. It will be written in Accra, Jakarta, São Paulo, Riyadh, and Johannesburg — through procurement, minerals, wheat, chips, and currency swaps, not communiqués.

If Canada wants to matter in that world, it must learn to listen before it leads, partner before it preaches, and treat the Global South as a peer, not a proving ground. The rules-based order was never built for us. It cannot be rebuilt without us. 

* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication and does not necessarily represent the views of Malay Mail.