The Civilization Trap

I. Beijing — Davos — Munich

On January 14, 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney landed in Beijing for the first visit by a Canadian head of government to China in nearly a decade. The relationship had been frozen since 2018, when China detained two Canadian citizens in retaliation for Canada’s arrest of a Huawei executive at American request. None of that seemed to weigh heavily on the proceedings. Two days later, Carney met Xi Jinping in the Great Hall of the People, announced a “new strategic partnership,” agreed to slash Canadian tariffs on Chinese electric vehicles from 100% to 6.1%, and came away describing China as a more “predictable” trading partner than the United States. He did not raise human rights issues vocally, saying that Canadians “take the world as it is, not as we wish it to be.” He used phrases like “new world order” — language that, whether he intended it or not, happens to map almost perfectly onto Beijing’s own preferred vocabulary for the post-American international arrangement it has been quietly constructing for years. He was feted, and flew home via Qatar.

Three days later, he was in Davos. What Carney said at the World Economic Forum on January 20 has already acquired the status of a landmark — the kind of speech people will cite when they try to pinpoint the moment a certain era was formally declared over. He opened with Václav Havel’s parable of the greengrocer: the shopkeeper who puts a sign in his window reading “Workers of the World, Unite!” not because he believes it, but to signal compliance, to avoid trouble, to get along. That sign, Carney said, is what the Western world had been displaying in its window for decades — the sign reading “Rules-Based International Order,” the sign reading “Mutual Benefit Through Integration.” Nobody fully believed it. Everyone displayed it. The bargain, he announced, was over. “We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.” The old order was not coming back, and nostalgia was not a strategy.

The room gave him a standing ovation — a rare event at Davos, where the default register is knowing concern rather than actual feeling. Even Trump was able to correctly infer that he ...