This article originally appeared in Maclean’s. An excerpt of the article appears below.
By Stephen Nagy, April 9, 2026
When Prime Minister Mark Carney took the stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year, the collective sigh of relief from the international community was almost audible. After a decade of performative, moralizing diplomacy under his predecessor, Carney has brought dignity, purpose, seriousness and undeniable brains back to the Prime Minister’s Office. To Canada’s allies in Tokyo, Seoul, Canberra, London and Washington, the return of adult supervision in Ottawa is a welcome development.
Yet, for all the intellectual rigour Carney brings to the global stage, the premise of his Davos pitch—a clarion call for a coalition of the world’s “middle powers” to band together to resist the crushing weight of American protectionism—collides violently with the geopolitical realities of 2026.
Carney’s instinct to seek safety in numbers is understandable. Washington is increasingly acting as what international relations scholar Stephen Walt terms a “predatory hegemon,” a superpower using its privileged position to extract asymmetric concessions from adversaries and allies alike. In response, Carney envisions a united front of liberal democracies, a middle-power bloc capable of offsetting American unilateralism while simultaneously managing a rising China.
It is an elegant theory. It is also practically impossible, largely because it relies on an outdated understanding of what a middle power actually is. For generations, Canadians have been raised on a romanticized, Lester B. Pearson–era definition of a middle power: a state that lacks the military or economic might of a superpower, but compensates by acting as a moral arbiter, a champion of multilateral institutions like the United Nations and a neutral peacekeeper. It is a definition rooted in a bygone era of postwar optimism, where international law and global consensus were presumed to be the ultimate guardrails of state behaviour.
The flaw in Carney’s dream of a neo-middle-power coalition aimed at checking the United States is that it ignores the structural realities of the post–Cold War order. We are living in what C. Raja Mohan aptly calls the “multipolar delusion.” Power is not evenly distributed; we remain in a world where the United States exercises unparalleled military and economic might, challenged only by Beijing.
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Stephen R. Nagy is a professor at the International Christian University, a senior fellow and China project lead at the Macdonald-Laurier Institute and a visiting fellow at the Japan Institute for International Affairs.
