By Manuel Raposo
January 28, 2026
Popular hat in Nuuk, Greenland, and Copenhagen, Denmark. And maybe in Davos, Switzerland.
Raposo is the editor of jornalmudardevida.net, a revolutionary web newspaper from Portugal. In this article Raposo takes up the forum at Davos, Switzerland, attended by bankers, CEOs and economists mainly from the imperialist countries. He analyzes the tensions between the U.S. imperialist superpower (in decline) and its secondary cronies. Translation: John Catalinotto.
Raposo’s article might arouse interest into how the working class in the imperialist countries will react to the collapse of the 80-year imperialist alliance. The initiative of the dockworkers at Mediterranean ports for an anti-militarist general strike on Feb. 6 is a new step in recent decades. They plan to stop delivering weapons.
Then there was the mass participation of U.S. unions in the Jan. 23 actions against the murders committed by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in Minneapolis in the United States.
Won’t it be possible to consider the working class of those countries, workers who play a central role in production, as a potential key contributor to the worldwide struggle against the U.S.-led imperialist exploiters?
January 24, 2026 – The speech by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney was the most striking event at this year’s Davos forum. Although pushed into the background, as expected, by the theater staged by Donald Trump — which the press and commentators follow like chickens hypnotized by a chalk circle — Carney’s speech painted a stark picture of today’s international reality.
We are not in transition to anything new, Carney said. We are witnessing “a rupture” of what has until now been called the “rules-based world order.” In other words, the order imposed by U.S. power.
Sometimes, statements from unexpected sources allow us to lift the veil on events that are slow to be understood or accepted by the general public. Or they allow us to confirm what others have said without success.
For example, the statements by Angela Merkel, former German chancellor, and François Hollande, former French president — confessing that the Europeans considered the Minsk agreements a mere expedient to gain time in order to arm Ukraine for war against Russia — reveal all the planning done by the Western powers to trigger the conflict.
The same is true of Trump’s statements about the U.S.’s overriding interest in Venezuelan oil. Such statements contradict his earlier arguments about drug cartels that served as a smokescreen for attacking Venezuela and kidnapping Nicolás Maduro.
The same is true of the repugnant statements by Israeli leaders about Palestinians and Arabs — revealing the colonialist and genocidal nature of the State of Israel and the depravity of its ruling clique.
Carney’s words have a similar impact, but with a greater reach: They declare the hegemonic power of the U.S. to be over (and perverse) and suggest a new arrangement in the global balance of power.
The end of ‘order’
The so-called “rules-based world order,” which Carney considers finished, has always been, in reality, an empty expression that covered up the arbitrariness of the U.S. regime and allowed it to act as it wished, against whomever it wished — sometimes invoking “humanitarian” reasons, sometimes brandishing the banner of “anti-terrorism,” sometimes arguing in defense of its “national security,” etc. These “rules” have never been the object of any concrete definition.
Moreover, under this banner, the U.S. has always found itself in the position of violating the rules of international law — those enshrined in the United Nations Charter — and able to escape any punishment whenever its interests as a power so required. It was force, not any right or rule, that always drove U.S. imperialism.
Now, and this is the point, the U.S. has been able to act in this way with impunity for decades, because it has had and continues to have a coterie of accomplices who have lived and continue to live in its protective shadow. The European Union and other European friends, Japan, NATO partners, G7 members, various alliances of all kinds forged around the world, global organizations such as the IMF, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization were and are instruments of U.S. dominance and a refuge for its cronies. That is why the now disenchanted voice of an accomplice country gives more weight to the words coming from the mouth of its prime minister.
When rules no longer protect
Carney admits that, “For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called a rules-based international order. … We benefited from its predictability. … We conducted foreign policy under its protection.” Although, he adds, we knew “that the story of that order was partly false,” because the strongest prevailed over the weakest, we still “participated in the rituals and avoided denouncing the differences between rhetoric and reality.” American hegemony “was useful.”
Carney goes on to say that, “This pact no longer works. … We are in the course of a rupture, not a transition.” As a result, Carney now feels compelled to denounce globalist economic integration, tariffs, financial power and supply chains as weapons of coercion against weaker countries — references that fit U.S. policy like a glove.
His conclusion: “When the rules no longer protect us, we must protect ourselves.”
Obedience no longer pays
It is not difficult to see in the Canadian prime minister’s words the shock of someone who wakes up from a pleasant dream to a terrible reality. The current U.S. administration’s threats against Canada, wanting it to become the 51st state of the U.S., its ambitions regarding Greenland with contempt for its European allies (heralding other possible conquests), the terrorism of a great power used against Venezuela, the commitment to turn the entire Western Hemisphere into a colony — all this together paints a complete picture of a power tormented by its own decline, resorting to the surest resource at its disposal: brute force, dispensed with the trappings of diplomacy.
Canada, like many other U.S. partners, realizes that “the very architecture of international institutions is under threat,” because they no longer serve U.S. interests, having turned into a straitjacket. Like many others, the Canadian regime also believed for a long time that “geography and alliances automatically brought prosperity and security,” but now “that is no longer valid.” There is no longer any place for “the hope that obedience brings security.”
Canada said in Davos that a “fundamental change in strategic posture” is therefore needed in a world marked by rivalry between the major powers. It is a warning that yesterday’s “ally,” the U.S., no longer hides its intention to reduce its subordinates to the status of vassals.
Good diagnosis. But the therapy?
This is where it gets tricky. Mark Carney’s proposals — which are, incidentally, explicit and frank — bear the mark of a second-tier power that, aware of its limited capabilities in a sea stirred up by the great powers, seeks to align its policies with other second-tier powers — but not with the truly disenfranchised of the earth.
Carney gave an example of the change his government is making, recently heading to China and Qatar where Canada has concluded “strategic partnerships.” He is seeking the same with India, ASEAN and Mercosur, undoubtedly seeking to counterbalance dependence on the U.S. In a clear call for Europeans to also try a change in “strategic posture,” he offers himself as a mediator between the Trans-Pacific Partnership and the EU.
To illustrate how middle powers have their capabilities and should increase them, Carney presents Canada’s assets: the country’s energy and critical mineral reserves, its brainpower and its financial and investment capacity. He defines the areas of international policy in which they should jointly engage: strengthening the G7, security in the Arctic, commitment to NATO and its Article 5, investment in more military capabilities of their own (including boots on the ground) and support for Ukraine to prolong the war within the framework of the “Coalition of the Willing.”
The renewed dream of the non-aligned
Canada is suggesting a kind of third way that attempts to respond to the crushing of secondary capitalist powers caused by the confrontation between the two or three major powers in today’s world: the declining imperialism of the U.S. on one side, and the China-Russia bloc, followed by the BRICS and the so-called Global South, on the other.
The question is whether such a maneuver can really succeed, since it would imply, to be consistent, a path of its own for the second-tier powers in the face of the path followed by the U.S. In fact, the economies of the capitalist West are closely interdependent, the result of having been structured for eighty years as complementary economies of contemporary imperialism, subordinate to the parent imperialism of the U.S. This applies not only to the economy but also to the political, cultural, military and other ties that bind them.
The greatest force for global change that can be envisaged today lies elsewhere: it lies in the countries that make up the periphery and semi-periphery of world capitalism — the so-called Third World or Global South. These are the ones that have everything to gain and nothing to lose from the collapse, not only of the U.S. but of the entire imperialist triad [U.S., EU, Japan], which is running its course.
In any case, the stark reality that Mark Carney brought to the forum, par excellence, of global imperialist capitalism, has the power to reveal yet another tear in the web woven by the U.S., at the center of which Donald Trump now sits.
