“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
Speaking in Davos before an assembled audience of billionaires, corporate leaders and elected officials, Mark Carney made a speech that reverberated around the world.
“Great powers,” Carney said, “have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” This was creating a “world of fortresses” as competition between great powers breaks down the integrated neoliberal order that has metastasized since the end of the Second World War, and gone global with the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Many are still working on the assumption that the order can be saved. Those people, Carney said, are “living in a lie.” The old order—the liberal world order we have known for all of our lives—is dead.
A few weeks later, another (different) diagnosis of the death of the world order grabbed headlines when U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, a member of the U.S. regime’s inner circle, spoke to the Munich Security Conference. Rubio, like Carney, spoke of the post-1945 order as being on its deathbed.
But rather than eulogizing the liberal world order, Rubio celebrated its passing. “In 1945, for the first time since the age of Columbus,” Rubio said, “[Western civilization] was contracting.” He rhapsodized about how that period saw the “great Western empires” fall to “anti-colonial uprisings that would transform the world and drape the red hammer and sickle across vast swaths of the map for years to come.”
No more, he said, would the countries of “the West” operate a “global welfare state” and “atone for the purported sins” of empires past. Now, the “abstractions of international law” will no longer shackle the great powers, who will take up the mantle of their conquering forebears and recolonize the earth.
For an avatar of the American Empire such as Marco Rubio to speak of the post-1945 period as one of contraction and decline is, of course, lunacy. The year 1945 was when the United States swaggered onto the world stage as hegemon, after the Soviet Union and Allied powers succeeded in defeating the fascist plague at enormous cost to human lives and the infrastructure that reproduces it. Out of those ruins, the United States emerged as the dominant imperial power, a power that only grew after the collapse of the socialist bloc and the end of the Cold War.
The United States used its power, during that period, to plunder and dominate. Immediately after the war, it began an unbroken campaign of overthrowing governments that attempted to assert sovereignty over their own resources—at times placing whole continents under the thumb of U.S.-backed military dictatorships. It sponsored genocides, provoked civil wars and state collapse, and plundered the resources of the Global South. But it did so while at least pretending to follow international law, and sharing in some of the spoils with the junior partners in Europe and the domestic working class.
Those days are over. The managers of empire, driven insane by fascist ideology and broken by the heightened contradictions of imperial liberalism, have abandoned the international order that put them at the pinnacle of world power. In its place, they seek to replace it with a regime of technofascism—a regime that they are testing and honing on subjugated populations like Palestinians, and have every intention of bringing home to roost.
Such a future is not inevitable, but defeating it will require struggle and sacrifice. It will also require a program for social transformation significantly more profound than preserving some version of the international liberal order among the “middle powers.”
The contours of the struggle ahead are taking shape more clearly every day. The old order is, indeed, gone. What comes next is up to us.
About the author
Jon Milton
Jon Milton is a writer and editor on the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives' communications team. His work focuses on social movements and social change.
