There is something uniquely nauseating about the Swiss Alps in January. It is the one place on earth where the oxygen is thin enough to make the world’s most bloated egos believe they are actually breathing the rarified air of wisdom, rather than just the recycled flatulence of five hundred private jets. It was in this neoliberal cathedral of Davos that Mark Carney, Canada’s Prime Minister and the human equivalent of a high-yield savings account, decided to deliver the eulogy for a corpse everyone else smelled a decade ago. The ‘rules-based international order’ is dead, he proclaimed, as if he were the first person to notice the burning wreckage of the 20th century.

Carney’s speech was a masterclass in the kind of intellectual cowardice that passes for leadership these days. He stood before the global elite—the very people who spent forty years dismantling every rule that didn't involve their own profit margins—and lamented that the world has become a place of coercion and intimidation. It is a touching sentiment, provided you have the memory of a goldfish and the moral compass of a weather vane. The ‘rules’ Carney so desperately mourns were never actually rules; they were suggestions for the weak and loopholes for the strong. But now that the ‘great powers’—the orange-hued tantrum in Washington and the silent surveillance state in Beijing—have stopped pretending to care about the polite fiction of international law, the middle-management nations like Canada are suddenly terrified.

Carney’s solution to this geopolitical apocalypse is, predictably, more bureaucracy. He called for ‘middle powers’ to band together. It is a charmingly pathetic image: a group of polite, second-tier economies forming a human shield to stop a nuclear-armed grizzly bear. He envisions a world where Canada, perhaps joined by the equally irrelevant remnants of the British Empire and a few scared Scandinavians, creates new alliances to resist ‘pressure tactics.’ It’s the diplomatic equivalent of the unpopular kids in the high school cafeteria forming a club to protest being shoved into lockers. The bullies don't care about your club, Mark. They don't even know you're in the room unless you're holding a tray of appetizers they want to steal.

The irony, of course, is that Carney’s ‘rules-based order’ was the very system that paved the road to this specific hell. For years, the Davos set preached the gospel of globalism, insisting that if we just traded enough plastic trinkets and shifted enough capital into offshore tax havens, the world would stabilize into a permanent state of boring, liberal peace. Instead, they just exported the means of production to their enemies and hollowed out their own middle classes, leaving behind a vacuum that was inevitably filled by the very ‘aggressive superpowers’ Carney now decries. You cannot spend decades feeding a tiger and then complain when it decides it prefers the taste of the zookeeper to the soy-based pellets you’ve been offering.

While Carney’s speech avoided mentioning Donald Trump by name—because in the world of high diplomacy, naming the monster makes it more likely to eat you—the subtext was screaming. He spoke of resisting intimidation, a clear nod to the fact that the United States has traded its role as the world’s nagging parent for the role of the world’s unpredictable, shotgun-wielding neighbor. But the Left will hail this as a brave defense of ‘values,’ ignoring that these values are usually just branding for Canadian mining interests or European carbon credits. Meanwhile, the Right will dismiss it as globalist drivel, missing the point that their own brand of isolationist chest-thumping is just as delusional as Carney’s belief in a ‘middle-power’ coalition.

The truth, which Carney is far too refined to admit, is that we are entering an era of pure, unadulterated thuggery. The ‘rules’ are whatever the person with the most drones says they are. Canada’s attempt to lead a resistance of the ‘middle’ is nothing more than a desperate plea for relevance in a world that has moved past the need for technocratic mediation. We are watching the end of the polite lie, and the best the leaders of the ‘sensible’ world can do is get together in a Swiss resort to discuss how much they miss the old lies. Carney isn't leading a movement; he’s just the last guy at the party trying to convince everyone that the cops aren't actually at the door. They are, Mark. And they’re not here to join the alliance. They’re here to seize the house.