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 ¡ª above all the United States ¡ª 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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