When Mark Carney, Canada’s prime minister and a Group of Seven leader, spoke this week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, one sentence stood out. “The old order is not coming back,” he said. The remark was delivered calmly, without polemic or finger-pointing, yet it captured a growing reality in global politics.
Carney was not merely responding to the return of America First politics or to U.S. President Donald Trump’s reappearance on the Davos stage. He was making a deeper claim: that the postwar assumption of a reliable guarantor of global economic rules — above all the United States — can no longer be taken for granted. The problem, in other words, is not a temporary deviation from normality. It is a structural shift.
From that diagnosis followed Carney’s central proposition. In a world where no single power can or will underwrite order, stability must increasingly be managed by middle powers acting together. For Japan, this was less a theoretical insight than a mirror held up to its own position in the world.
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