By Matias Spektor
Thursday, January 29, 2026
This month, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney took the
stage at the World Economic Forum in Davos and delivered a blunt verdict on the
international order. For decades, he argued, Western countries prospered by
invoking a rules-based system that they knew was hypocritical. They cited
liberal ideals while routinely exempting themselves from adhering to them,
championed free trade while enforcing it selectively, and spoke the language of
international law and human rights while applying those principles unevenly to
friends and rivals. “We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided
calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality,” Carney acknowledged. This
system was tolerable because it provided stability and because American power,
despite its double standards, supplied the public goods that other Western
countries depended on. But, in Carney’s words, “this bargain no longer works.”
This “rupture” in the international system, as Carney
called it, stems from the collapse of that bargain. Powerful countries—namely
the United
States under President Donald Trump—are abandoning not only the rules that
sustained the international order but also the pretense that their actions are
and should be guided by principle. Carney is right that something fundamental
has shifted. But in calling for middle and emerging powers to stop paying lip
service to a broken system, he underestimates what else vanishes when pretense
disappears.
Carney insisted that smaller countries, such as Canada, could still
uphold certain liberal values even as the overarching “rules-based order” faded
away. It remains altogether unclear how middle powers could pull off such a
salvage job, and whether any international, values-based regime can arise from
the wreckage left by the United States. That is worrying. A world in which
powerful states no longer feel compelled to justify themselves morally is not
more honest—it is more dangerous. When great powers feel obliged to justify
their behavior in moral terms, weaker states gain leverage. They can appeal to
shared standards, invoke international law, and demand consistency between
rhetoric and action. But without the need to maintain even the fiction of
principle, a powerful country can do what it pleases knowing that it can be
constrained only by the power of others. The instability this breeds will not
spare even the strong.
A LITTLE HELP FROM HYPOCRISY
Hypocrisy has long played a double role in international
politics. It has bred resentment and distrust between global powers, but it has
also constrained power by making states answerable to the moral standards they
claim to uphold. Throughout the Cold War, the United
States justified its leading role in the international order by using the
language of democracy and human rights, even as its actions fell short of those
ideals. That hypocrisy did not go uncontested. Allies and nonaligned states
alike repeatedly invoked American rhetoric to criticize U.S. behavior and
demand greater consistency between the principles the United States was
championing and what the country was doing in practice. This pressure yielded
tangible results. For instance, domestic and international scrutiny prompted a
congressional investigation by the 1975 Church Committee into the conduct of
the U.S. intelligence community, including its covert operations abroad. The
committee’s findings reshaped oversight of U.S. intelligence operations and
elevated human rights as a meaningful consideration in foreign policy
decisions.
That pressure persisted into the post–Cold War era. When
the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, it justified the war by invoking
international law and the threat of weapons of mass destruction. These
arguments collapsed because the weapons never materialized. The international
backlash to the invasion was severe precisely because Washington had claimed to
operate within a rules-based order. A similar dynamic later surrounded the use
of drone strikes by the United States across multiple countries. As the U.S.
drone program expanded under several administrations, international lawyers,
allies, and civil society groups cited American commitments to due process and
the rule of law to demand accountability for the killings. In response,
Washington developed legal rationales, narrowed targeting criteria, and
accepted greater political scrutiny over how and where it used drone strikes.
The constraint that hypocrisy provided was always
imperfect. American power still prevailed. But the obligation to justify—to
maintain at least the appearance of principled action—created friction. It gave
weaker states a language with which to resist and made great-power behavior
answerable, even if incompletely, to something beyond raw interest.
AMORAL AMERICA
That dynamic has weakened sharply in recent years. The
defining feature of the current moment is not that the United States violates
the principles it once championed but that it increasingly dispenses with the
need to justify its actions in those terms at all. Whereas earlier
administrations cloaked U.S. power in the language of law, legitimacy, or
universal liberal values, Washington now defends its foreign policy in bluntly
transactional terms.
This shift was already visible during Trump’s first term.
When he withdrew the United States from the Iran nuclear deal, known as the
Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, in 2018, Trump did
not argue that Tehran had violated international norms or that the agreement
endangered regional stability. He dismissed it as simply a bad deal for the
United States. Likewise, when confronted with the murder of the Saudi
journalist Jamal Khashoggi, Trump defended continued U.S. relations with Saudi
Arabia not by appealing to strategic necessity, but by pointing to arms sales
and jobs that benefited the United States financially. In both cases,
Washington did not deny the underlying facts. It denied that moral
justification was required.
In his second term, Trump has stripped away the language
of justification altogether. When he threatened Denmark and seven
other European allies with tariffs over their opposition to his bid to acquire
Greenland, he framed the dispute not in terms of shared interests or alliance
obligations but explicitly as leverage—a transactional demand to extract
territorial concessions. Similarly, in February 2025, Trump issued an executive
order imposing sanctions on the International Criminal Court not because he
contested its legal authority or offered an alternative framework for
accountability, but because the ICC had investigated his ally Benjamin
Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. Perhaps most starkly, when asked in an
interview with The New York Times in early January whether Chinese
President Xi Jinping might move against Taiwan, Trump replied that although
such aggression would make him “very unhappy,” the decision was up to Xi. These
are not violations of stated principles that appeal to necessity or higher
purpose. They are naked assertions of interest, unadorned by even the pretense
of principle.
Washington’s refusal to cite principle when making
foreign policy fundamentally alters the terms of contestation for weaker
states. Critics can condemn Trump’s policies as crude or self-interested, but
they struggle to accuse the U.S. president of hypocrisy. There is no gap
between professed virtue and practice when the claim to virtue is abandoned.
Power no longer appeals to universal principle; it asserts particular
entitlement. The result is not simply a harsher diplomatic style, but a shift
in the fundamental terms by which American power operates—and, crucially, how
it can be resisted.
NO MORE HIGH ROAD
At first glance, the abandonment of moral justification
appears to solve a long-standing problem. If hypocrisy erodes credibility and
invites backlash, then refusing to make moral claims can seem like a more
efficient way to exercise power. Without appeals to universal principles, there
are fewer reputational costs to pay when mere material and political interests
prevail. Some observers welcome this shift. Celso Amorim, one of Brazil’s
senior diplomats, has argued that with Trump “there is no hypocrisy,” only
“naked and raw truth” that allows countries to negotiate without illusions
about true U.S. motives.
But efficiency comes at a cost. When great powers no
longer feel compelled to justify their behavior, disputes that once unfolded as
arguments over legitimacy increasingly become tests of leverage. Sanctions are
a prime example. Under the old regime, a sanctioning power was expected to
explain why its measures responded to specific violations and conformed to
shared rules. When the Obama administration negotiated the Iran nuclear deal in
2015, it documented Iran’s violations of Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
obligations and UN Security Council resolutions, presenting the agreement as a
legalized framework subject to verification. Today, a great power can impose
sanctions simply to advance its interests. In August 2025, for example, Trump
imposed 50 percent tariffs on India not because India had violated a trade
agreement, but because Trump was personally indignant over New Delhi’s
rejection of his offer to mediate during tensions with Pakistan. In such a
system, bargaining replaces persuasion, and compliance depends less on consent
than on coercion. International politics loses the language through which
disputes can be negotiated—allowing the stronger parties to determine outcomes
as they please.
This shift may appear manageable for the most powerful
states, which can easily impose costs and absorb backlash. But it is far more
destabilizing for the global system as a whole. Without the pressures of
hypocrisy to constrain it, power operates with fewer buffers and mediating
institutions. A bare hierarchy arises in which cooperation is harder to sustain
and conflict more likely to escalate.
MIDDLE POWERS, GREAT SHIFTS
The costs of this shift are not borne evenly, and they
extend beyond U.S. rivals to harm American interests themselves. One of the
clearest consequences is visible in the U.S. relationship with the global
South, where the disappearance of shared standards and moral justification has
begun to make it harder for Washington to manage conflict through institutions
rather than relying on its leverage. For much of the post–Cold War era, appeals
to shared rules allowed countries in the global South to contest pressure from
the United States without letting disputes become mere tests of power.
Brazil’s experience is illustrative. A latecomer to trade
liberalization, Brazil long resisted the rules of global free trade. But once
it finally embraced that system, it learned to use the rules to its advantage.
When Brazil, a major cotton producer, challenged U.S. cotton subsidies in the
early 2000s on the grounds that by bolstering its domestic cotton industry the
United States was violating its obligations under the World Trade Organization,
it did so through the WTO’s litigation mechanisms. Washington lost the case and
was forced to make concessions. The dispute unfolded within a shared, mutually
accepted international legal framework that kept relations intact and expanded
bilateral trade.
Contrast that with U.S. trade policy toward Brazil today.
In 2025, Trump imposed sweeping tariffs on Brazilian exports not on the basis
of trade violations, but as retaliation for domestic political developments in
Brasília—specifically, judicial action against the former Brazilian president
Jair Bolsonaro, a political ally of Trump’s who had tried and failed to
overturn an election. Brazil did not appeal to multilateral trade norms in
response. It instead reduced its exposure to the United States, deepened its
trade ties with China, and signaled that its rare-earth reserves could become a
bargaining chip. De-escalation came only after American companies with a stake
in Brazil applied pressure on the White House.
The same shift is visible in the United States’
relationship with its closest allies. For decades, countries such as Germany
accepted asymmetric partnerships with Washington because shared principles,
rules, and institutions gave them a voice within the international system.
Multilateralism did not eliminate American dominance, but it did soften it.
West Germany’s—and starting in 1990, a unified
Germany’s—postwar relationship with the United States rested on this logic.
Deeply embedded in NATO and the global trading system, German leaders relied on
law, institutions, and proceduralism to manage asymmetry with Washington.
Disputes were framed as arguments within a common order, not confrontations
over power. When the United States pressured the West German government in Bonn
to constrain nuclear technology exports to developing countries in the 1970s, Bonn
accepted restrictions through the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and Nuclear
Suppliers Group, subordinating commercial interests to nonproliferation norms
that were U.S.-led but shared by both countries. That approach enabled it to
resist American authority selectively while remaining a key U.S. ally.
As Washington has stopped justifying U.S. actions through
appeals to liberal values and norms, however, that equilibrium has been
disturbed. Trump has framed U.S. pressure on Germany in overtly transactional
terms: tariffs were justified as leverage, threats of secondary sanctions were
tied to energy policy, security commitments were recast as protection services.
Germany’s response has been to make itself less reliant on the United States,
doubling down on European industrial policy, investing in energy and defense
autonomy, and diversifying its partnerships with other countries. Berlin is
insulating itself against a world in which U.S. power operates through leverage
rather than shared rules and dependence on Washington becomes a vulnerability.
Canada faces a similar predicament. Trump has threatened
Canada with punitive tariffs and demanded that the country abandon its
independent energy policy in favor of U.S. interests. More starkly, Trump has
repeatedly suggested that Canada become the 51st U.S. state. Like Germany,
Canada has begun to reduce its reliance on Washington, accelerating efforts to
diversify trade partnerships and strengthen ties with other powers. Both
countries are pursuing what might be called strategic autonomy—an effort to preserve
independence in decision-making now that the United States no longer constrains
itself through appeals to shared norms. This is precisely the dynamic that
Carney, in his Davos address, identified as the defining feature of the new
international rupture: the collapse of the rules-based order has forced even
the closest U.S. allies to treat the United States not as a partner bound by
shared principles, but as a power to be hedged against—or, in Canada’s case,
defended against.
GOODBYE TO ALL THAT MORALITY
For the United States, the implications of its shift away
from moral justification are stark. This abandonment does not simply erode U.S.
advantages; it triggers the kind of strategic diversification among
Washington’s partners that could dissolve the system it once controlled. The
distinctive achievement of American power was not dominance itself, but the
ability to translate that dominance into the genuine consent of other
countries. Alliances held together by transactions alone may persist, but they are
thinner and less likely to mobilize when leadership is most needed. In losing
the language of principle, the United States loses the ability to make the
imposition of its power acceptable to others.
The disappearance of hypocrisy can be mistaken for
progress. It may feel like a trend toward honesty and an end to double
standards, posturing, and self-deception. But hypocrisy played a structural
role in the international order that is now being dismantled. By claiming to
act in the name of shared principles, powerful states made themselves
vulnerable to contestation. That vulnerability gave weaker states leverage,
allowed allies to manage asymmetry without rupture, and helped turn dominance
into something other states could accept, even when they resented it.
To be sure, this is not an argument for restoring a world
that no longer exists. The rules-based order was never as principled as it
claimed to be, and hypocrisy often concealed injustice as much as it
constrained power. But by pretending to act in the name of universal values,
powerful states conceded that those values mattered. When those states no
longer feel compelled to legitimize their authority, the international system
once sustained by consent devolves into one where power operates without restraint,
making conflict more frequent and harder to contain. The paradox of hypocrisy
was that it limited power even as it enabled it. The United States could well
discover that raw dominance is harder to sustain than a flawed order that
others once had reason to believe in.
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