Carney inaugurates 'global centrism': but how will the Indo-Pacific feature?
CARNEY INAUGURATES ‘GLOBAL CENTRISM’:
BUT HOW WILL THE
INDO-PACIFIC FEATURE?
WRITTEN BY QUAH SAY JYE AND CONNOR O’BRIEN
6 March 2026
Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos on 20 January 2026 has been widely lauded. Beyond marking a curtain call for the “rules-based international order”, the speech exhorted middle powers to shed their illusions and reject great power subordination, which — while left unnamed — has manifested through both US trade and security interventionism as well as China’s rapid military modernisation and resurgent “wolf warrior” diplomacy. Doing so would require coordination to “create a third path with impact”, such that “like-minded” middle powers can lead a geopolitical bloc in their own right.
What Carney articulated did not come out of a vacuum. It formalised a line of thought that has been brewing for some time, emphatically inaugurating a diplomatic and ideological current coined here as ‘global centrism’. This ‘global centrist’ posture is defined through its opposition to left- and right-wing populism and support for international institutions and trade globalisation. When combined with a shared centrist political temperament, it holds out the promise of durable international cooperation beyond the vicissitudes of great power politics.
Carney — and Canada — are not alone in this enterprise. Different aspects of Carney’s address resonate with prominent speeches or writings across the past year, especially since US President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025. French President Emmanuel Macron’s speech at the 2025 Shangri-La Dialogue argued for the construction of new “coalitions of action”. Former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull followed in Foreign Affairs by calling for US allies to resist Trump’s “bullying” tactics. Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong has pitched “flexible multilateralism” as a possible path forward in various speeches, including the World Economic Forum event in June 2025.
The thorny question remains what lines are not worth crossing, and when normative and institutional guardrails may prove strategically beneficial over the long term, especially for small and middle powers.
These visions feed into each other, but until Carney’s speech were not packaged into a singular project. The historian Adam Tooze provides a clue to what holds them together in describing Carney as the “charismatic figurehead of global centrism”. Carney’s speech gave global centrism a reference point by pinning the project to an identifiable political leader and outlining a general quasi-manifesto of action.
While it will no doubt galvanise international opinion, Carney’s speech also exposed two fundamental challenges to this emergent geopolitical project: its unevenness in the Indo-Pacific and the ambiguities of values-based realism.
Global centrism’s unevenness in the Indo-Pacific
First, global centrism’s constitution is conspicuously uneven and lacks a material coalitional basis. This is evident geographically: how the Indo-Pacific — a region increasingly central to the world economy – features in Carney’s vision is unclear, let alone the Global South. The 2026 World Economic Forum was at heart a transatlantic event — few of the headline interventions were from figures in Asia, with the exception of China’s Vice-Premier He Lifeng. Instead, the most prominent speeches were given by Carney, Trump, and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz.
This leaves open how different players in the Indo-Pacific region, particularly traditional US allies such as South Korea, Japan, and Australia, might react to Carney’s speech. While they may agree in principle on the need for a collective response to the unfolding geopolitical rupture, no straightforward moves are available to them. Their economic and security profiles vary considerably amongst themselves — and even more so with Canada or Europe — with different threat perceptions of great powers.
Recent events have underscored a sense within Canada that the US is not as friendly as it once was. For Europe, the primary sense of threat still comes from Russia, after four years of war in Ukraine. But for South Korea and Japan, it is China that looms largest in their strategic thinking. In fact, it is the fear of US retrenchment, given the failure of the long-promised “pivot to Asia”, that is front of mind in East Asia and parts of Southeast Asia. None of these geopolitical conditions are commensurable with each other, and there appears no middle power balancing strategy that would satisfy immediate economic and security interests while holding a global centrist bloc together.
In large part, this tracks Carney’s vision, which emphasises less a homogeneous, unified bloc of states that speaks with one voice on all issues. Instead, it feeds off the ambiguity of the middle power label by gesturing towards issue-based coalitions that cluster together in select matters but splinter on others. The productive purchase is flexibility – the momentum towards a free trade deal between Canada and ASEAN is a case in point. Yet, the lack of a foundational coalitional glue beyond ad-hoc alignment offers few tools to combat both acute regional security issues and genuinely global issues like climate change, which will require strong buy-in from Indo-Pacific partners. If great power competition further intensifies, most middle powers will likely need to go it alone or through minilaterals targeting specific security challenges, even as some strive to avoid ‘picking sides’.
Ambiguities of ‘value-based realism’
The ambiguous character of middle power diplomacy underscores global centrism’s second pitfall – its anchor in “value-based realism”, which Carney draws explicitly from Finland’s Prime Minister Alexander Stubb. Value-based realism, as Carney articulates in his Davos address, counsels actors to be “both principled and also pragmatic” — clear-eyed and strategic, yet guided by common values.
Walking that line, however, proves difficult in practice. As commentators have pointed out across countries in the Global North and South: how come on Greenland it’s principle, but on Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, and indeed Trump’s Board of Peace, it’s pragmatism? Traditional US allies like France, Germany, and New Zealand are amongst those who have refused to join the board. But under value-based realism, what grounds are there to condemn ‘capitulation’ to such efforts? Indonesia’s decision to join the board has prompted much internal debate, given the apparent deviation from its traditional non-aligned foreign policy. While these arguments have some merit, this decision can be justified precisely for its pragmatism. For example, one analyst has described Indonesia’s decision to join the board as ultimately strategic, as it might give them a seat at the table to influence proceedings. And perhaps most importantly, it may have helped pave the way for the recently finalised Indonesia-US trade deal.
Values-based realism thus fails to transcend the endemic challenges of Machiavellian foreign policy, where the strategic merits of ends-means trade-offs only become clear in hindsight. The thorny question remains what lines are not worth crossing, and when normative and institutional guardrails may prove strategically beneficial over the long term, especially for small and middle powers.
Limits of global centrism in Southeast Asia
Global centrism shows prudent instincts: a rupture in the global order requires urgent recalibration. But without concrete ballast — in the form of enduring investments in the Indo-Pacific and the Global South and clear lines that separate flexible from inviolable values — Carney’s vision may read as Davos nostalgia redux: persuasively spoken, but with limited potential for addressing current global crises.
A key question for global centrism vis-à-vis the Indo-Pacific concerns the role of Southeast Asia and its institutional expression, ASEAN. In Southeast Asia, trade tends to take precedence over ‘values’, reflecting the oft-cited notion “trade is strategy”. Despite initially being targeted by Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs, Southeast Asian exports to the US have boomed as an alternative to Chinese producers. It is unlikely that key Southeast Asian economies such as Indonesia and Vietnam would disrupt this export growth by pivoting away from the US at this critical juncture. Instead, they will likely continue to chart their own path amidst unfolding geoeconomic competition to maximise their development prospects.
In response to these imperatives, Canada’s recent efforts to step up trade agreements with ASEAN are an obvious step in the right direction. But whether they can offer what Southeast Asia requires for its economic development — investments, critical resources, and security — amidst spiralling geoeconomic competition remains unclear. The US is still the largest source of foreign direct investment into ASEAN, encompassing over 30 per cent according to 2023 data.
We are perhaps left where we started, with global centrism struggling to grapple with the unfolding ideological and political realignments, offering neither a distinctive bloc politics nor a novel synthesis of values and interests to guide middle powers through the storm.
DISCLAIMER: All views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily represent those of the 9DASHLINE.com platform.
Author biographies
Quah Say Jye is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge. His research interests lie broadly at the intersection of political theory, history of political thought (1945-), and Southeast Asian studies. More details can be found on his website.
Connor O’Brien is a PhD candidate at the University of Cambridge, specialising in international political economy. He previously served as editor-in-chief of the Cambridge Review of International Affairs and as an Australian diplomat.
Image credit: World Economic Forum/Ciaran McCrickard.