Seva, this is great and I'm sharing it widely. I have been thinking along the same lines, and believed Carney to be possibly the most important global actor since the moment he stepped into the PM race. His speech will be on syllabi for decades to come. He understands the need to re-wire the network, and the mechanisms required to do so, and also understands the most of the infrastructure needed for structural transition is already in place. He is educating his fellow world leaders (and citizens of the free world) in real time, very effectively.
how odd (or maybe fitting) that it took a sensible technocrat from canada to capture the moment. agreed, it's a syllabus-worthy speech. and thanks for sharing
That's my point: IMO everyone thought he was sensible technocrat when he actually was a visionary statesman. Consequently they underrated him, and he is now well ahead of the curve.
Similarly, I don't think he's capturing the moment, I think he's propelling the moment. He has been building infrastructure for a year. Now he intends to use it.
WKW, you and Seva convinced me to watch the speech. And now I'm swung to agree with your points.
To which I'd like to add a note from sociological and philosophical churn over theories of power. It seems to me that Carney's use of the Havel greengrocer metaphor overcomes a limitation flagged in Steven Lukes's Power: A Radical View 3e (2021, https://bit.ly/LukesS-2021 ). At pages 172-73:
"This for Havel is clear: when the greengrocer stops putting up the slogan and begins to say what he really thinks, he will begin to ‘live in truth’ and the whole system will collapse from within. Having long admired this essay, I have come to agree with David Ost’s sharp critique of it (Ost 2018). Havel, Ost writes, ‘never gives the greengrocer his due’ (304); indeed, his approach is patronizing and condescending. Moreover, it is ‘morally wrong in that it blames the most vulnerable’ and it is ‘politically false: state socialism did not collapse because regular people stopped conforming to rituals, but when movements organized by activists became strong enough to win over and transform wary conformists’ (302). "
I don't think so. But IMO the 'sensible technocrat' is not well-defined conceptually or theoretically (not even historically... Keynes was not a technocrat). I am working on a paper about that but it's not ready.
For now, note that Carney is *not* proposing technical solutions to efficiency problems imposed from the center outward to reform the current system incrementally.
He is proposing greater representation and more decentralized forms of interdependence, so as to create a new system that emphasizes reciprocity among middle powers.
He is doing that because his formative political experience was as head of the Bank of Canada during the subprime crisis, when there were widespread calls in Europe and Asia for a new Bretton Woods to put the system on a more sustainable trajectory. After those calls went unheeded he became head of the Bank of England. Then Brexit followed. After Brexit was Trump, then Covid. Now here we are.
He knows what holds systems together and he knows how systems break. He's seen it from the inside. He knows this one is breaking, he knows how to finish breaking it. He also has an idea for what should come next, and he has already been implementing that vision for a year without people even really noticing it.
Someone hoping to build a new system is not a technocrat. Someone actively building the infrastructure to transition to that new system is a revolutionary.
Interestingly enough, the newer CUP Mynott translation of the Melian dialogue addresses a number of problems that spawned out of Crawley's more famous 1874 version that everyone continues to quote.
Mynott translates it as "...in the human sphere judgements about justice are relevant only between those with an equal power to enforce it, and that the possibilities are defined by what the strong do and the weak accept."
In a footnote for the line, he actually directly states that Thucydides' point was that the strong can become cynical and disregard moral considerations altogether, which can lead to their downfall. Power makes relevant the *judgements* of justice by the powerful and subsequently defines the possibilities of said justice.
Not quite as poetic or memorable as Crawley's translation, but it does make the dialogue's literary goal of conveying Athens' tragedy much clearer. It's a shame that so many still read the Melian dialogue out of context and come away from it with the exact opposite of Thucydides' point.
Popular ancient history is deeply rooted in the 19th century and often aggressively fulminates against any evolution in our understanding from the 19th century.
Great stuff Seva. Rather like a previous commentator, I have my reservations re Weaponized Interdependence. As a banker, Carney is not only cynical but he knows the considerable limits of state power and the deeply transnational nature of our financialised world economy. Internet cables and dollar clearing houses may allow for geopolitcal chokeholds but in general capital does not abide a limit. The MAGA broligarchs have used all these workarounds themselves in their own illicit financial dealings so the idea that they are now practising realpolitik is fanciful. I'd like to hear more from Carney about how a middle power deals with oligarchy, another concept of the Greeks he might have invoked. The most significant shift over the long term is not a "return to Great power politics" but the transformation of the state under globalization whereby it does not hold oligarchs in check but magnifies their power on the global stage.
that's a really important point and I think why the "return to great power politics" stuff misses something. trump is running a protection racket, and as a fan of transnational kleptocracy like the kind you and alex have written about, he is not interested in great power rivalries but in enriching himself along with a specific oligarchic class. And for sure carney understands this better than most
I've been referring to what Trump is attempting as a Mafia State, modernized to adapt to the position he's in, but he's not all that different from the mobsters he grew up with.
It's pretty clear in the speech what the strategy is. The middle powers must make their own deals with each other, creating among themselves their own international order. They already know how to do this.
Previously, the middle powers took the lead from the United States and signed onto the rules the US wanted. They were generally, but not always, good rules. However, that era is over. That is the rupture (the rapture for those left behind).
The better era is the one in which it is not the strong the define the rules, but the rest who, together, outweigh the strong. The strong can join in the rules if they like. If not, they will have the handicap of operating outside of them.
An early taste of the new era was the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement. When the US pulled out of those negotations, everyone remaining left just did the deal anyway while eliminating the elements that had to be there as the price of including the US. Now, if the US wants into the TPP, it will have to sign up to the agreement in place.
All those TPP members have better access among themselves than the US could have with any one of them.
Yes, that's his strategy for dealing with Trump's US. And maybe that's what matters most if we think geopolitically. But it is not a strategy for dealing with a more oligarchic world - which we've had many times before in history and which will long outlast Trump, in my view.
Yes, one of the big questions. The WH is filled with powerful and influential oligarchs particularly from the Silicon Valley tech-authoritarian world. They will never disappear.
No, they won't...yet. European countries can start to replace the software and systems of the US companies. Difficult to be sure, but ultimately doaable. They legally can ring fence and partially block what cloud platforms can do, and ensure hardware performs for users, not the manufacturer. If the AI buildout proves a bust, that will take out several oligarchs. AFAIK, locals are preventing oligarchs from building their own libertarian/fiefdom town in N. California.
Cory Doctorow has interesting ideas to end the control of hardware and software controls of the oligarchs by changing the rules. (This is about the hegemon's control of trade rules.) Remember that the USA broke up the monopolists with anti-trust legislation. While it has been weakened over the last 40 years, it can be restored with political will.
Carney made a good point about dynamic alliances. The EU is blocked by countries like Hungary from doing things that all the other countries agree to. That is why there are now Coalitions of the Willing to help Ukraine. The US will find itself isolated and nowhere near as strong as it thinks, spending blood and treasure to maintain its power. This will prove Imperial Overstretch, the eventual fall of previous empires such as Britain's. It took very few decades for Britain to give up its empire and retreat, ending the Pax Britannica. Trump and Trumpism are speeding up the end of the Pax Americana. I just hope liberalism can effectively reform its strengths.
As a classicist l, it’s a delight to see Thucydides getting so much play. His thought is complex, but there’s definitely an argument to be made that he believed that Athens was hubristic at Melos. He and his readers knew the Athenians would lose and narrowly escape the fate of the Melians themselves.
What defeats Athens in the end is Persian money rather than middle powers or Athenian subjects in revolt. So the analogy is strained, as historical analogies tend to be.
The clearest lesson is probably that, even on a realist view of history, stupid realists, even if they are powerful, can well lose to wise and resilient moralists.
I would add only that the new imperialist idiots in the US - Miller, chiefly, but also others - have characteristically completely failed to think through the implications of their abandonment of generational alliances. The US Nuclear umbrella used to have just enough credibility to keep most allies from developing their own WMDs, which actually worked to enhance US power. Many of those countries would now be foolish not to consider investing in a North Korean style limited deterrent, which will very much undo the overall anti-proliferation framework even for non-allies, both of which will ultimately neuter US power & exceptionalism.
Wonderful speech. And wonderful analysis. It is Americans that must stand up for democracy in our country if we are to preserve democratic institutions. They threatened everywhere- but we need to restore their vitality at home - and part of this is restoring the balance of power, diminishing the power of oligarchs whose power has grown so dramatically in the last four decades.
There are two things I thought were missing in Farrell & Newman's book. The first was an account of the earlier era of weaponized interdependence, the one run by Great Britain, which is passed over with a perfunctory glance. The second was obvious problem that weaponized interdependence is self-limiting: too much weaponization makes the interdependence go away. The preservation of interdependence requires the dependent to calculate that on net they are better off with the status quo. Otherwise, the sign in the window comes down.
Those two lacunae are obviously related? And if people around Trump have read the book and drawn the wrong conclusions, they may have done harm.
Waltz in Theory of International Politics is very clear that asymmetric interdependence is a source of conflict. (he's writing this in the context of globalization apparently triumphing). But I doubt people in the administration read Waltz
F & N get a lot right but they don't have a model or method, so they have a difficult time getting beyond metaphors. In fact they do say that WI can produce backlash, but it isn't WI that produced backlash. This isn't WI. This is overt imperialism.
If you'd like a model/method to help think through where we've been, and where we're going, then maybe this will be useful as a starting point: the 'PA' part of FPA is currently being re-wired, that's what we're observing and that's what Carney just described in his speech.
Although I have used an identical mathematical network model for my own purposes, it is not clear to me what dynamics you intend here. Over what time-scale does Pr_i apply? Do you mean to suggest that the clock is fast enough to ensure we are always at equilibrium? Is there a proof that this equilibrium exists? If there is an endogenous shock, over what time scales would the system revert to equilibrium (measured in actual time, not simulation time steps)?
The loading on the phi parameters also seems a bit vague for the purposes of IR. I have nothing against reduced-form models (how could I, I work in finance), but normally I have a clear and verifiable procedure for calibrating model parameters. I think that leaving phi open-ended reduces its structural explanatory power.
China has been deliberately attempting to increase its PA (by measures such as "belt and road" etc.) In the model we can "explain" increased connections by increasing China's fitness. How would that be quantified? We could just adjust the number of connections, but then the model cannot explain why they increased. How, quantitatively, would one cope with counterfactuals? For example, suppose that there is a revolution in China and it removes capital controls and institutes a strong rule-of-law regime. How would we adjust China's phi?
Thanks for the great thoughts. It's not an alternative view of equilibrium (I do not believe in equilibrium). I do not discuss shocks for similar reasons (I don't understand them conceptually, b/c I don't reason from equilibria). And while the parameters can be estimated that's not really the point of this paper. This paper is much more basic/introductory than that.
The goal is to motivate more evolutionary *thinking* as an alternative to equilibrium analysis, and to provide people with a relatively simple framework that is very portable across domains. I try to provide some illustrative reasons why this approach might yield fruit, but did not have the room to go more granular than that in this paper. In fact I was already way over the word limit, and the journal editor had to fight with the publisher for it to be accepted at all.
I.e., I wasn't (in this paper) interested in precisely-estimating the extent to which a market-oriented Chinese revolution would increase their network connectivity and thus PA potential. IMO, the discipline is quite a ways a way from being able to conduct studies on that level. But what I want the discipline to do is start asking questions like those, and start building models capable of answering them.
So in *this* paper I'm just trying to get people to think about modeling endogenous structural processes as being *causally important, empirically rigorous, and theoretically interesting* rather than something that must just be "controlled" for so we can estimate the effect of "independent" X on "dependent" Y, at some midpoint of the distribution, holding the other variables constant at their means. When you model things that way all of the important stuff ends up in the error term.
Instead, I want IR people to think about the international system as something that is constantly evolving, never stable, "ordered" but through iterated patterns of behavior rather than formal regime. It is only ever partially stable, and does not require a "shock" to change... change is the normal state of affairs. It's a more scientific, and less philosophical, way of thinking about IR.
To bring this back to F&N, the original WI argument was that "weaponization" of things like the SWIFT payments system would produce backlash that might, over time, dilute the US's position at the core of the system. The prediction of my model is that that is unlikely: if the US is to lose core position it will likely be sudden and chaotic, and it will likely be the result of internal factors rather than external backlash.
Now think about what we've seen as the US has rapidly increased its abuse of the system. What we've seen is ROW bending over backwards, to an absurd degree, to beg the US to remain in a core position in the system, which the US adamantly refuses to accept.
That is not understandable in a WI framework. It is not only easily understandable in a FPA framework, it is expected.
Check. This sounds fully persuasive to me. Though I'd qualify that I am nowhere near up to the math needed to judge that, your summary latches with my philosophy of social science and my gripes and wishes for scholarship in IR.
Question: where did you shake out on the Brooks and Wohlforth et al debates in Foreign Affairs, (2023 their original https://fam.ag/3qdMT4a) and 2023b (their reply to critics, The Long Unipoliar Moment?" https://fam.ag/3HVLJQf ).
I'm long overdue to read your 2020 paper. I saved it a couple years ago and sadly, it slipped out of my queue to read; I just forgot. Gotta bump that up now.
Underground Empire (2023) made clear enough for me, what you claim as gap #2. I take Farrell and Newman to have covered just fine, the hypothetical contingency of if the U.S. overreaches, then might others withdraw and/or push back. If anything, Underground Empire *might* have made the assertion maybe too bright, on too thin evidence, I thought when I read it two years ago. But I'd have to re-read and weigh the book to stand on that quibble; or I may find their prose duly hedges.
That the book doesn't elaborate much on the assertion of if-then U.S. domination falters, I think is plenty fair in a book that does not ask to be read as futuristic predictive posturing (of which I think we have far too much in IR commentary). A virtue of Underground Empire for me is that the book loads empirical as befits the subtitle, "How America Weaponized the World Economy".
There is nothing "underground" about this empire, this is not "overreach" in usage of a technocratic apparatus for non-technocratic purposes, and others are not merely "withdrawing" from these technocratic structures out of resentment.
Instead, the resentful actor is the hegemon, which is actively and maliciously destroying its own system, a system which everyone else -- from Canada to China, Rio to Riyadh -- is desperately trying to maintain.
This is not what WI expected. It just isn't.
I don't want to debate the finer points of these things. Overall I like the work they've done and have signal-boosted it many times. Noting that they didn't solve all problems in one article and one mass market book is not intended to be a hurtful critique, it is just the nature of these things. The lack of an explicit model in WI has been noted many times by many people, including at least one of the authors of WI himself. They had different goals with that project, and they have been successful in those goals, and that's great.
But WI does not tell us everything we need to know.
Thank you, WKW. I meant the above bit in reply to Philip Koop's comment, to which you'd replied. It looks like I pushed "reply" in the wrong spot.
I appreciate your rejoinder. And I see your point about the push coming from the hegemon. But I'm not sure (I'll keep thinking about your counter to me) how far that departs from Underground Empire's vague (as I recall) contemplation like, what if the USA would abuse its powers in the opinion of other national actors dialed into U.S.-run global infrastructures.
Contrary to you saying "there is nothing 'underground' about this empire", I do see a lot of low-visibility power resources, at least relative to imagined understandings of lay publics, and very elites' understandings too I would surmise. And a hefty measure of this less-visible infrastructure that Underground Empire profiles, *is* underground physically.
I'd extend that metaphorically to a sociological and philosophical claim in Steven Lukes's three-dimensional power theory from which I quote up-thread out of PRV 3e (2021, https://bit.ly/LukesS-2021 ). Lukes thinks that less-visible power plays (his third dimension) efficiently amplify the grip of those already higher up social structures. How so? Lukes puts it that people lower down in social hierarchies, are more easily led and governed when they *don't see* (aren't aware of, don't understand) the tracers of higher-up interests and influences on one's own desires and carrying on in life. That idea, that less visibility hikes up the power of those above, is an idea one could trace at least to Hegel and up through the Frankfurt School and maybe Gamsci. This is a philosophical lineage that Lukes would recognize as his own heritage, even before Lukes found Foucault for his 2021 third edition of PRV. And I think a suggestion like this, rings through indirectly Farrell and Newman depicting in Underground Empire an ICT infrastructure that is buried underfoot and undersea, little-known to most people, yet dominated as hard power affordances serving the U.S. military and associated spy apparatuses and U.S. financial governance, etc.
Your note, I'll carry in mind. Again, I need to read your 2020 paper. I certainly benefit from all this comment thread after Seva's essay. And I've now read twice, to my benefit, your August 2025 "After Hegemony VI" ( https://bit.ly/WinecWK-2025-8_31 ).
In the McCarthy period, the first 'removal of the sign in the window' was someone asking publicly "Sir, have you no decency?". The current periode needs someone from the right with standing to do the equivalent now. But who is left that can do that? They have all abased themselves and turned themselves into doormats. And what impact does a doormat have?
The strong suffering what they must might be less about power's decline than about power's blind spots. When a hegemon's internal contradictions become its primary vulnerability, the external challengers merely reveal what was already rotting from within. Does this suggest that true hegemonic stability requires not just material dominance, but the capacity for genuine self-reflection about its own contradictions?
There's a whole other reason for distrusting the Melian story: Robert Oppenheimer blew up that world, after 10,000 years of feudalism.
Kids these days - they don't understand the truly terrifying thing about nuclear weapons. We've abandoned them so thoroughly that they've actually become "unthinkable" - not considered in calculations like this.
The truly terrifying thing about nuclear weapons is that they are CHEAP. Dirt cheap. Wars, armies, air forces are very expensive, and most of the world can't even begin to compete with a big modern army. But, once you get the development done, the production line of electronics and precision machinery that can make nuclear weapons is in the hundreds of millions; and the Bombs are $1M-$2M apiece.
Now, even the ICBMs are cheap. Look up "Agni-V" in the wikipedia. >7000km range. Multiple warheads. $6M each. So a dozen Agni-V, with 12 bombs each would still be under $400M, the cost of one F35 with a few years of operation. And could wipe out every major capital in Europe. Which India can do, this afternoon. Be polite!
Robert Oppenheimer created a new world in which the Melians can wipe out Sparta and Athens on any afternoon. So could a lot of mid-size Greek cities (so to speak). It's not just India that could wipe out Europe. Bangladesh could afford it. So could Bhutan.
THAT'S why we invented the rules-based order. Not because the Great Powers were charitable; they are not, and that's why the "League of Nations" failed. The UN survives because it exists to protect the Great Powers from the vengeance of the Melians, from Czecheslovakia and Mexico becoming Great Powers, too. By providing them with safety and no reason to build nukes, they protected themselves from proliferation where they would have been the favourite targets of the whole world.
David Singh Grewal blows a time-out whistle today in Compact ( https://bit.ly/GrewaDS-2026-1_26 ). Like everybody freeze and let's get to questions: what was *not* said by Carney? Also, let's trace what *actually* seems to have been *done*, prior to Carney's savvy speech, as we imagine (or wish-cast?) what might lie ahead.
Grewal, I find persuasive, and I take his correction here with gratitude. I was wondering a bit, when reading W.K. Winecoff up thread here, what about network power as Grewal argued it in his 2009 book of that title? ( https://bit.ly/GrewaD-2018 ) In which Grewal gives network efficiencies of scale their due as economically efficient, while cushioning this with social norms and psychic habits that Grewal theorizes on sociological streams down from Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel.
Seva, I think Grewal's Compact essay today, chimes with your cold hedging in conversation with Van Jackson on Un-Diplomatic podcast ( https://bit.ly/GunJac-2026-1_22 ). Indeed critics of liberal internationalism might miss it once afoot in grass on the other side.
Rhetorically, Carney gave a great speech - my concern is was it wasted? Inevitably, US actions were different from the noise and hype. We have 3 more years of this to deal with but at the end of that time, it will still be in the best interests of the US and Europe to be closely tied together economically, socially and for security. Arguably the end point in Greenland will strengthen not weaken the security part of those ties. Maybe the time for a rest will be 2029?
I have a caveat / concern about the (nonetheless excellent) use of Havel, that in Havel nobody believed in the slogan in the poster, and its primary, or really only, utility is to signal to evade punishment.
But the 'rules-based order' was only partially false - it was a useful fiction. And it was a useful fiction in which repeating and emphasizing the usefulness of the rules, their desirability, played some role in increasing compliance overall, and more agreed to play by the rules (on paper), etc. And even the more powerful nations made efforts to comply / appear to comply / violate in (what they considered) exceptional circumstances, etc.
The compliment that vice pays to virtue and all that.
This sounds a fair amount like a social contract in a society (really any society) with unequal distribution of power and poor or imperfect enforcement: everyone knows there are inconsistencies and problems, that money buys power, and [list your further criticisms here].
But as long as some generalized perception of fairness continues to be observed, that the corruption and exemptions the powerful grant themselves and their friends are somewhat limited, the fiction can continue to be a useful one.
That's not so much a criticism of Carney's use of Havel - but that the rules-based order was better than most of the alternatives, until it was broken. Without getting nostalgic about resurrecting it, we'd do well if what came out the other side borrowed the good bits, even if it required some partial fictions.
Anyway, I'd prefer to use a different analogy about an obvious fiction, the old Soviet "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." It was a partially useful fiction (that more of the modern economy resembles than most would like to admit) - the state did pretend to pay, at least just enough, usually, for the workers to survive and be somewhat incentivized (not revolt), and workers did pretend quite well and even did some minimal level of work for their employers.
Which leads me to my favourite anecdote about this, a taxi driver in '90s Moscow complaining about the completely dysfunctional economy of the time, the ruble, etc. I mentioned the old saying 'we pretend to work, etc.,' and the driver delivered a smashing blow to the steering wheel and yelled 'and then everyone stopped pretending at the same f*ing time!' [and everything fell apart.]
I think someone else said the metaphor is stretching it because canada is more like the apparatchik who hands out the poster, not the grocer. fwiw I don't think he's saying the order was as hollow as that, but that the posture of middle powers has been grocer-like, i.e. going along and performing belief in exchange for stability. more about the accommodation than the underlying system's value.
the taxi driver anecdote is especially funny because it underscores the point, the danger is not that everyone kept pretending but what happens when the pretense suddenly collapses
Oh I agree - I definitely don't think the intent was to say that it's comparable to 'workers of the world unite' in its vapidity - but inevitably now we are doomed to listen to years of discourse where the useful fiction part is omitted and Carney is cited as saying 'it was all fake and they were lying to us all! It was all about exploitation and oppression!' Yes, we have all been going along; there is a time - when the negatives outweigh the positives and it becomes more dangerous than useful - to call it out. It's a good analogy, but like all analogies, imperfect - that's why he said it was 'partial truths', and not utter bollocks.
[And a side note, I'd say US admins/'strategists' have for the most part been keenly aware that the nature of the 'rules-based' social contract required the hegemon to play the game closer to the rules than they might have been able to get away with, and not reset or rewrite the rules arbitrarily and at the slightest whim. Just as while electoral systems might need adjustments from time to time, once one has re-written a constitution several times to keep oneself in power, even a fool will recognize it is no longer a system where the electorate retains a semblance of a choice.]
The taxi driver anecdote: exactly; I think that phrase was one of the most concise (and pithy!) descriptions of what happened that I've heard, and comparable to what a bank run is (and see Solnick's Stealing the State for a more detailed version of that theory).
Seva, this is great and I'm sharing it widely. I have been thinking along the same lines, and believed Carney to be possibly the most important global actor since the moment he stepped into the PM race. His speech will be on syllabi for decades to come. He understands the need to re-wire the network, and the mechanisms required to do so, and also understands the most of the infrastructure needed for structural transition is already in place. He is educating his fellow world leaders (and citizens of the free world) in real time, very effectively.
how odd (or maybe fitting) that it took a sensible technocrat from canada to capture the moment. agreed, it's a syllabus-worthy speech. and thanks for sharing
That's my point: IMO everyone thought he was sensible technocrat when he actually was a visionary statesman. Consequently they underrated him, and he is now well ahead of the curve.
Similarly, I don't think he's capturing the moment, I think he's propelling the moment. He has been building infrastructure for a year. Now he intends to use it.
WKW, you and Seva convinced me to watch the speech. And now I'm swung to agree with your points.
To which I'd like to add a note from sociological and philosophical churn over theories of power. It seems to me that Carney's use of the Havel greengrocer metaphor overcomes a limitation flagged in Steven Lukes's Power: A Radical View 3e (2021, https://bit.ly/LukesS-2021 ). At pages 172-73:
"This for Havel is clear: when the greengrocer stops putting up the slogan and begins to say what he really thinks, he will begin to ‘live in truth’ and the whole system will collapse from within. Having long admired this essay, I have come to agree with David Ost’s sharp critique of it (Ost 2018). Havel, Ost writes, ‘never gives the greengrocer his due’ (304); indeed, his approach is patronizing and condescending. Moreover, it is ‘morally wrong in that it blames the most vulnerable’ and it is ‘politically false: state socialism did not collapse because regular people stopped conforming to rituals, but when movements organized by activists became strong enough to win over and transform wary conformists’ (302). "
Can't he be both?
I don't think so. But IMO the 'sensible technocrat' is not well-defined conceptually or theoretically (not even historically... Keynes was not a technocrat). I am working on a paper about that but it's not ready.
For now, note that Carney is *not* proposing technical solutions to efficiency problems imposed from the center outward to reform the current system incrementally.
He is proposing greater representation and more decentralized forms of interdependence, so as to create a new system that emphasizes reciprocity among middle powers.
He is doing that because his formative political experience was as head of the Bank of Canada during the subprime crisis, when there were widespread calls in Europe and Asia for a new Bretton Woods to put the system on a more sustainable trajectory. After those calls went unheeded he became head of the Bank of England. Then Brexit followed. After Brexit was Trump, then Covid. Now here we are.
He knows what holds systems together and he knows how systems break. He's seen it from the inside. He knows this one is breaking, he knows how to finish breaking it. He also has an idea for what should come next, and he has already been implementing that vision for a year without people even really noticing it.
Someone hoping to build a new system is not a technocrat. Someone actively building the infrastructure to transition to that new system is a revolutionary.
I am deeply, deeply saddened by how accurately the speech described the state of affairs
Interestingly enough, the newer CUP Mynott translation of the Melian dialogue addresses a number of problems that spawned out of Crawley's more famous 1874 version that everyone continues to quote.
Mynott translates it as "...in the human sphere judgements about justice are relevant only between those with an equal power to enforce it, and that the possibilities are defined by what the strong do and the weak accept."
In a footnote for the line, he actually directly states that Thucydides' point was that the strong can become cynical and disregard moral considerations altogether, which can lead to their downfall. Power makes relevant the *judgements* of justice by the powerful and subsequently defines the possibilities of said justice.
Not quite as poetic or memorable as Crawley's translation, but it does make the dialogue's literary goal of conveying Athens' tragedy much clearer. It's a shame that so many still read the Melian dialogue out of context and come away from it with the exact opposite of Thucydides' point.
Popular ancient history is deeply rooted in the 19th century and often aggressively fulminates against any evolution in our understanding from the 19th century.
Great stuff Seva. Rather like a previous commentator, I have my reservations re Weaponized Interdependence. As a banker, Carney is not only cynical but he knows the considerable limits of state power and the deeply transnational nature of our financialised world economy. Internet cables and dollar clearing houses may allow for geopolitcal chokeholds but in general capital does not abide a limit. The MAGA broligarchs have used all these workarounds themselves in their own illicit financial dealings so the idea that they are now practising realpolitik is fanciful. I'd like to hear more from Carney about how a middle power deals with oligarchy, another concept of the Greeks he might have invoked. The most significant shift over the long term is not a "return to Great power politics" but the transformation of the state under globalization whereby it does not hold oligarchs in check but magnifies their power on the global stage.
that's a really important point and I think why the "return to great power politics" stuff misses something. trump is running a protection racket, and as a fan of transnational kleptocracy like the kind you and alex have written about, he is not interested in great power rivalries but in enriching himself along with a specific oligarchic class. And for sure carney understands this better than most
Thanks Seva. I wrote about Hubris two weeks ago. Not at all original but needs saying. It was very much a long the lines of Carney’s speech writer so maybe he stole it? But the addition of Havel is genius. https://open.substack.com/pub/johnheathershaw/p/a-bully-in-the-playground?r=nmeam&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
Mark Carney wrote the speech himself.
Interesting. Do you know if he normally writes his own speeches?
I've been referring to what Trump is attempting as a Mafia State, modernized to adapt to the position he's in, but he's not all that different from the mobsters he grew up with.
It's pretty clear in the speech what the strategy is. The middle powers must make their own deals with each other, creating among themselves their own international order. They already know how to do this.
Previously, the middle powers took the lead from the United States and signed onto the rules the US wanted. They were generally, but not always, good rules. However, that era is over. That is the rupture (the rapture for those left behind).
The better era is the one in which it is not the strong the define the rules, but the rest who, together, outweigh the strong. The strong can join in the rules if they like. If not, they will have the handicap of operating outside of them.
An early taste of the new era was the Trans Pacific Partnership trade agreement. When the US pulled out of those negotations, everyone remaining left just did the deal anyway while eliminating the elements that had to be there as the price of including the US. Now, if the US wants into the TPP, it will have to sign up to the agreement in place.
All those TPP members have better access among themselves than the US could have with any one of them.
Yes, that's his strategy for dealing with Trump's US. And maybe that's what matters most if we think geopolitically. But it is not a strategy for dealing with a more oligarchic world - which we've had many times before in history and which will long outlast Trump, in my view.
Yes, one of the big questions. The WH is filled with powerful and influential oligarchs particularly from the Silicon Valley tech-authoritarian world. They will never disappear.
No, they won't...yet. European countries can start to replace the software and systems of the US companies. Difficult to be sure, but ultimately doaable. They legally can ring fence and partially block what cloud platforms can do, and ensure hardware performs for users, not the manufacturer. If the AI buildout proves a bust, that will take out several oligarchs. AFAIK, locals are preventing oligarchs from building their own libertarian/fiefdom town in N. California.
Cory Doctorow has interesting ideas to end the control of hardware and software controls of the oligarchs by changing the rules. (This is about the hegemon's control of trade rules.) Remember that the USA broke up the monopolists with anti-trust legislation. While it has been weakened over the last 40 years, it can be restored with political will.
Carney made a good point about dynamic alliances. The EU is blocked by countries like Hungary from doing things that all the other countries agree to. That is why there are now Coalitions of the Willing to help Ukraine. The US will find itself isolated and nowhere near as strong as it thinks, spending blood and treasure to maintain its power. This will prove Imperial Overstretch, the eventual fall of previous empires such as Britain's. It took very few decades for Britain to give up its empire and retreat, ending the Pax Britannica. Trump and Trumpism are speeding up the end of the Pax Americana. I just hope liberalism can effectively reform its strengths.
As a classicist l, it’s a delight to see Thucydides getting so much play. His thought is complex, but there’s definitely an argument to be made that he believed that Athens was hubristic at Melos. He and his readers knew the Athenians would lose and narrowly escape the fate of the Melians themselves.
What defeats Athens in the end is Persian money rather than middle powers or Athenian subjects in revolt. So the analogy is strained, as historical analogies tend to be.
The clearest lesson is probably that, even on a realist view of history, stupid realists, even if they are powerful, can well lose to wise and resilient moralists.
Great piece, reflecting on a remarkable speech.
I would add only that the new imperialist idiots in the US - Miller, chiefly, but also others - have characteristically completely failed to think through the implications of their abandonment of generational alliances. The US Nuclear umbrella used to have just enough credibility to keep most allies from developing their own WMDs, which actually worked to enhance US power. Many of those countries would now be foolish not to consider investing in a North Korean style limited deterrent, which will very much undo the overall anti-proliferation framework even for non-allies, both of which will ultimately neuter US power & exceptionalism.
Wonderful speech. And wonderful analysis. It is Americans that must stand up for democracy in our country if we are to preserve democratic institutions. They threatened everywhere- but we need to restore their vitality at home - and part of this is restoring the balance of power, diminishing the power of oligarchs whose power has grown so dramatically in the last four decades.
There are two things I thought were missing in Farrell & Newman's book. The first was an account of the earlier era of weaponized interdependence, the one run by Great Britain, which is passed over with a perfunctory glance. The second was obvious problem that weaponized interdependence is self-limiting: too much weaponization makes the interdependence go away. The preservation of interdependence requires the dependent to calculate that on net they are better off with the status quo. Otherwise, the sign in the window comes down.
Those two lacunae are obviously related? And if people around Trump have read the book and drawn the wrong conclusions, they may have done harm.
Waltz in Theory of International Politics is very clear that asymmetric interdependence is a source of conflict. (he's writing this in the context of globalization apparently triumphing). But I doubt people in the administration read Waltz
F & N get a lot right but they don't have a model or method, so they have a difficult time getting beyond metaphors. In fact they do say that WI can produce backlash, but it isn't WI that produced backlash. This isn't WI. This is overt imperialism.
If you'd like a model/method to help think through where we've been, and where we're going, then maybe this will be useful as a starting point: the 'PA' part of FPA is currently being re-wired, that's what we're observing and that's what Carney just described in his speech.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1354066120952876
Thanks.
Although I have used an identical mathematical network model for my own purposes, it is not clear to me what dynamics you intend here. Over what time-scale does Pr_i apply? Do you mean to suggest that the clock is fast enough to ensure we are always at equilibrium? Is there a proof that this equilibrium exists? If there is an endogenous shock, over what time scales would the system revert to equilibrium (measured in actual time, not simulation time steps)?
The loading on the phi parameters also seems a bit vague for the purposes of IR. I have nothing against reduced-form models (how could I, I work in finance), but normally I have a clear and verifiable procedure for calibrating model parameters. I think that leaving phi open-ended reduces its structural explanatory power.
China has been deliberately attempting to increase its PA (by measures such as "belt and road" etc.) In the model we can "explain" increased connections by increasing China's fitness. How would that be quantified? We could just adjust the number of connections, but then the model cannot explain why they increased. How, quantitatively, would one cope with counterfactuals? For example, suppose that there is a revolution in China and it removes capital controls and institutes a strong rule-of-law regime. How would we adjust China's phi?
Thanks for the great thoughts. It's not an alternative view of equilibrium (I do not believe in equilibrium). I do not discuss shocks for similar reasons (I don't understand them conceptually, b/c I don't reason from equilibria). And while the parameters can be estimated that's not really the point of this paper. This paper is much more basic/introductory than that.
The goal is to motivate more evolutionary *thinking* as an alternative to equilibrium analysis, and to provide people with a relatively simple framework that is very portable across domains. I try to provide some illustrative reasons why this approach might yield fruit, but did not have the room to go more granular than that in this paper. In fact I was already way over the word limit, and the journal editor had to fight with the publisher for it to be accepted at all.
I.e., I wasn't (in this paper) interested in precisely-estimating the extent to which a market-oriented Chinese revolution would increase their network connectivity and thus PA potential. IMO, the discipline is quite a ways a way from being able to conduct studies on that level. But what I want the discipline to do is start asking questions like those, and start building models capable of answering them.
So in *this* paper I'm just trying to get people to think about modeling endogenous structural processes as being *causally important, empirically rigorous, and theoretically interesting* rather than something that must just be "controlled" for so we can estimate the effect of "independent" X on "dependent" Y, at some midpoint of the distribution, holding the other variables constant at their means. When you model things that way all of the important stuff ends up in the error term.
Instead, I want IR people to think about the international system as something that is constantly evolving, never stable, "ordered" but through iterated patterns of behavior rather than formal regime. It is only ever partially stable, and does not require a "shock" to change... change is the normal state of affairs. It's a more scientific, and less philosophical, way of thinking about IR.
To bring this back to F&N, the original WI argument was that "weaponization" of things like the SWIFT payments system would produce backlash that might, over time, dilute the US's position at the core of the system. The prediction of my model is that that is unlikely: if the US is to lose core position it will likely be sudden and chaotic, and it will likely be the result of internal factors rather than external backlash.
Now think about what we've seen as the US has rapidly increased its abuse of the system. What we've seen is ROW bending over backwards, to an absurd degree, to beg the US to remain in a core position in the system, which the US adamantly refuses to accept.
That is not understandable in a WI framework. It is not only easily understandable in a FPA framework, it is expected.
Let me know if that doesn't make sense.
Check. This sounds fully persuasive to me. Though I'd qualify that I am nowhere near up to the math needed to judge that, your summary latches with my philosophy of social science and my gripes and wishes for scholarship in IR.
Question: where did you shake out on the Brooks and Wohlforth et al debates in Foreign Affairs, (2023 their original https://fam.ag/3qdMT4a) and 2023b (their reply to critics, The Long Unipoliar Moment?" https://fam.ag/3HVLJQf ).
I'm long overdue to read your 2020 paper. I saved it a couple years ago and sadly, it slipped out of my queue to read; I just forgot. Gotta bump that up now.
Underground Empire (2023) made clear enough for me, what you claim as gap #2. I take Farrell and Newman to have covered just fine, the hypothetical contingency of if the U.S. overreaches, then might others withdraw and/or push back. If anything, Underground Empire *might* have made the assertion maybe too bright, on too thin evidence, I thought when I read it two years ago. But I'd have to re-read and weigh the book to stand on that quibble; or I may find their prose duly hedges.
That the book doesn't elaborate much on the assertion of if-then U.S. domination falters, I think is plenty fair in a book that does not ask to be read as futuristic predictive posturing (of which I think we have far too much in IR commentary). A virtue of Underground Empire for me is that the book loads empirical as befits the subtitle, "How America Weaponized the World Economy".
There is nothing "underground" about this empire, this is not "overreach" in usage of a technocratic apparatus for non-technocratic purposes, and others are not merely "withdrawing" from these technocratic structures out of resentment.
Instead, the resentful actor is the hegemon, which is actively and maliciously destroying its own system, a system which everyone else -- from Canada to China, Rio to Riyadh -- is desperately trying to maintain.
This is not what WI expected. It just isn't.
I don't want to debate the finer points of these things. Overall I like the work they've done and have signal-boosted it many times. Noting that they didn't solve all problems in one article and one mass market book is not intended to be a hurtful critique, it is just the nature of these things. The lack of an explicit model in WI has been noted many times by many people, including at least one of the authors of WI himself. They had different goals with that project, and they have been successful in those goals, and that's great.
But WI does not tell us everything we need to know.
Thank you, WKW. I meant the above bit in reply to Philip Koop's comment, to which you'd replied. It looks like I pushed "reply" in the wrong spot.
I appreciate your rejoinder. And I see your point about the push coming from the hegemon. But I'm not sure (I'll keep thinking about your counter to me) how far that departs from Underground Empire's vague (as I recall) contemplation like, what if the USA would abuse its powers in the opinion of other national actors dialed into U.S.-run global infrastructures.
Contrary to you saying "there is nothing 'underground' about this empire", I do see a lot of low-visibility power resources, at least relative to imagined understandings of lay publics, and very elites' understandings too I would surmise. And a hefty measure of this less-visible infrastructure that Underground Empire profiles, *is* underground physically.
I'd extend that metaphorically to a sociological and philosophical claim in Steven Lukes's three-dimensional power theory from which I quote up-thread out of PRV 3e (2021, https://bit.ly/LukesS-2021 ). Lukes thinks that less-visible power plays (his third dimension) efficiently amplify the grip of those already higher up social structures. How so? Lukes puts it that people lower down in social hierarchies, are more easily led and governed when they *don't see* (aren't aware of, don't understand) the tracers of higher-up interests and influences on one's own desires and carrying on in life. That idea, that less visibility hikes up the power of those above, is an idea one could trace at least to Hegel and up through the Frankfurt School and maybe Gamsci. This is a philosophical lineage that Lukes would recognize as his own heritage, even before Lukes found Foucault for his 2021 third edition of PRV. And I think a suggestion like this, rings through indirectly Farrell and Newman depicting in Underground Empire an ICT infrastructure that is buried underfoot and undersea, little-known to most people, yet dominated as hard power affordances serving the U.S. military and associated spy apparatuses and U.S. financial governance, etc.
Your note, I'll carry in mind. Again, I need to read your 2020 paper. I certainly benefit from all this comment thread after Seva's essay. And I've now read twice, to my benefit, your August 2025 "After Hegemony VI" ( https://bit.ly/WinecWK-2025-8_31 ).
In the McCarthy period, the first 'removal of the sign in the window' was someone asking publicly "Sir, have you no decency?". The current periode needs someone from the right with standing to do the equivalent now. But who is left that can do that? They have all abased themselves and turned themselves into doormats. And what impact does a doormat have?
The strong suffering what they must might be less about power's decline than about power's blind spots. When a hegemon's internal contradictions become its primary vulnerability, the external challengers merely reveal what was already rotting from within. Does this suggest that true hegemonic stability requires not just material dominance, but the capacity for genuine self-reflection about its own contradictions?
Also, purchase nuclear weapons.
There's a whole other reason for distrusting the Melian story: Robert Oppenheimer blew up that world, after 10,000 years of feudalism.
Kids these days - they don't understand the truly terrifying thing about nuclear weapons. We've abandoned them so thoroughly that they've actually become "unthinkable" - not considered in calculations like this.
The truly terrifying thing about nuclear weapons is that they are CHEAP. Dirt cheap. Wars, armies, air forces are very expensive, and most of the world can't even begin to compete with a big modern army. But, once you get the development done, the production line of electronics and precision machinery that can make nuclear weapons is in the hundreds of millions; and the Bombs are $1M-$2M apiece.
Now, even the ICBMs are cheap. Look up "Agni-V" in the wikipedia. >7000km range. Multiple warheads. $6M each. So a dozen Agni-V, with 12 bombs each would still be under $400M, the cost of one F35 with a few years of operation. And could wipe out every major capital in Europe. Which India can do, this afternoon. Be polite!
Robert Oppenheimer created a new world in which the Melians can wipe out Sparta and Athens on any afternoon. So could a lot of mid-size Greek cities (so to speak). It's not just India that could wipe out Europe. Bangladesh could afford it. So could Bhutan.
THAT'S why we invented the rules-based order. Not because the Great Powers were charitable; they are not, and that's why the "League of Nations" failed. The UN survives because it exists to protect the Great Powers from the vengeance of the Melians, from Czecheslovakia and Mexico becoming Great Powers, too. By providing them with safety and no reason to build nukes, they protected themselves from proliferation where they would have been the favourite targets of the whole world.
The Sicilian expedition is one of my favorite parts of the Pellopennsian War
David Singh Grewal blows a time-out whistle today in Compact ( https://bit.ly/GrewaDS-2026-1_26 ). Like everybody freeze and let's get to questions: what was *not* said by Carney? Also, let's trace what *actually* seems to have been *done*, prior to Carney's savvy speech, as we imagine (or wish-cast?) what might lie ahead.
Grewal, I find persuasive, and I take his correction here with gratitude. I was wondering a bit, when reading W.K. Winecoff up thread here, what about network power as Grewal argued it in his 2009 book of that title? ( https://bit.ly/GrewaD-2018 ) In which Grewal gives network efficiencies of scale their due as economically efficient, while cushioning this with social norms and psychic habits that Grewal theorizes on sociological streams down from Durkheim, Weber, and Simmel.
Seva, I think Grewal's Compact essay today, chimes with your cold hedging in conversation with Van Jackson on Un-Diplomatic podcast ( https://bit.ly/GunJac-2026-1_22 ). Indeed critics of liberal internationalism might miss it once afoot in grass on the other side.
Rhetorically, Carney gave a great speech - my concern is was it wasted? Inevitably, US actions were different from the noise and hype. We have 3 more years of this to deal with but at the end of that time, it will still be in the best interests of the US and Europe to be closely tied together economically, socially and for security. Arguably the end point in Greenland will strengthen not weaken the security part of those ties. Maybe the time for a rest will be 2029?
Great piece, thank you.
I have a caveat / concern about the (nonetheless excellent) use of Havel, that in Havel nobody believed in the slogan in the poster, and its primary, or really only, utility is to signal to evade punishment.
But the 'rules-based order' was only partially false - it was a useful fiction. And it was a useful fiction in which repeating and emphasizing the usefulness of the rules, their desirability, played some role in increasing compliance overall, and more agreed to play by the rules (on paper), etc. And even the more powerful nations made efforts to comply / appear to comply / violate in (what they considered) exceptional circumstances, etc.
The compliment that vice pays to virtue and all that.
This sounds a fair amount like a social contract in a society (really any society) with unequal distribution of power and poor or imperfect enforcement: everyone knows there are inconsistencies and problems, that money buys power, and [list your further criticisms here].
But as long as some generalized perception of fairness continues to be observed, that the corruption and exemptions the powerful grant themselves and their friends are somewhat limited, the fiction can continue to be a useful one.
That's not so much a criticism of Carney's use of Havel - but that the rules-based order was better than most of the alternatives, until it was broken. Without getting nostalgic about resurrecting it, we'd do well if what came out the other side borrowed the good bits, even if it required some partial fictions.
Anyway, I'd prefer to use a different analogy about an obvious fiction, the old Soviet "we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us." It was a partially useful fiction (that more of the modern economy resembles than most would like to admit) - the state did pretend to pay, at least just enough, usually, for the workers to survive and be somewhat incentivized (not revolt), and workers did pretend quite well and even did some minimal level of work for their employers.
Which leads me to my favourite anecdote about this, a taxi driver in '90s Moscow complaining about the completely dysfunctional economy of the time, the ruble, etc. I mentioned the old saying 'we pretend to work, etc.,' and the driver delivered a smashing blow to the steering wheel and yelled 'and then everyone stopped pretending at the same f*ing time!' [and everything fell apart.]
I think someone else said the metaphor is stretching it because canada is more like the apparatchik who hands out the poster, not the grocer. fwiw I don't think he's saying the order was as hollow as that, but that the posture of middle powers has been grocer-like, i.e. going along and performing belief in exchange for stability. more about the accommodation than the underlying system's value.
the taxi driver anecdote is especially funny because it underscores the point, the danger is not that everyone kept pretending but what happens when the pretense suddenly collapses
Oh I agree - I definitely don't think the intent was to say that it's comparable to 'workers of the world unite' in its vapidity - but inevitably now we are doomed to listen to years of discourse where the useful fiction part is omitted and Carney is cited as saying 'it was all fake and they were lying to us all! It was all about exploitation and oppression!' Yes, we have all been going along; there is a time - when the negatives outweigh the positives and it becomes more dangerous than useful - to call it out. It's a good analogy, but like all analogies, imperfect - that's why he said it was 'partial truths', and not utter bollocks.
[And a side note, I'd say US admins/'strategists' have for the most part been keenly aware that the nature of the 'rules-based' social contract required the hegemon to play the game closer to the rules than they might have been able to get away with, and not reset or rewrite the rules arbitrarily and at the slightest whim. Just as while electoral systems might need adjustments from time to time, once one has re-written a constitution several times to keep oneself in power, even a fool will recognize it is no longer a system where the electorate retains a semblance of a choice.]
The taxi driver anecdote: exactly; I think that phrase was one of the most concise (and pithy!) descriptions of what happened that I've heard, and comparable to what a bank run is (and see Solnick's Stealing the State for a more detailed version of that theory).
Fantastic.