Photo credit: Aljazeera
Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney went to the World Economic Forum and told the world that his country – extrapolation, all US allies – had lived a “pleasant fiction” that is now over. That fiction was grounded in the assumption that the United States would continue to lead a global order and that such order would perpetually guarantee stability, ;provide limitless liquidity, and manage all systemic risks. Under the global order, American hegemony would continue to “provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.”
This does not obtain anymore.
The Dawn reports that this is where the irony lies. For Carney, as also other US allies, US hegemony worked and made them prosper as long as its application of force targeted states and societies in what we loosely describe as the Global South: Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, to name just the most obvious regions. These are also the regions where a number of states or leaders within those states decided to remove the signboard, to not live the lie that Canada was so content to live with until recently an acquiesced in.
Those leaders were picked off – the list is long from Mohamed Mosaddegh to Patrice Lumumba to Ngo Din Diem to Salvador Allende to hundreds of failed attempts on Fidel Castro – those states suffered and most, like Iran, continue to suffer. The system’s power did not come from its truth, but from Canada’s willingness, as of other US allies, to perform as if it were true. Now, “its fragility comes from the same source”, as identified by Carney.
I argue that the challenge faced by the US allies is not that the United States has suddenly become more of a hegemon. The entire post-WWII system was grounded in unequal power distribution accepted by hegemony of the US by its allies. In fact, as we shall discuss later, the centrality of a dominant power is the core tenet of an integrated alliance system that must also have a unifying perception of threat and shared values.
Carney’s assertion that “when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness”, and his invocation of Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue are, therefore, about the direction of the exercise of US hegemony, not hegemony itself. What is true, however, is the fact and Carney’s realisation of it, that a hegemon’s interest can change. That is what has happened.
To that end, I pro[ose to briefly look at how the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) came about and what exactly is the Greenland issue about. Finally, I argue that, while this moment may not be a Wagnerian frenzy, it could lead to that in the years to come, quite possibly unravelling Europe, which is not a single, seamless entity but a conglomerate of multiple states and ethnolinguistic groupings.
Today, NATO is taken for granted. But the idea and its actualisation did not evolve as a premeditated American design. It emerged from European insecurity, economic and military, and involved a drawn-out and complex diplomatic process. The US was still grappling with its new global role and was reluctant to get involved in Europe’s affairs again. The Joint Chiefs of Staff and National Policy Volume II 1947-1949 by military historian Kenneth Condit makes clear that post-war demobilisation had left the US military (all branches) starved of manpower materiel.
For the full article, please read Dawn, EOS, February 8th, 2026
