Corporate risk teams call it volatility. Governments call it realism. Boards call it fiduciary duty. But in practice, it is a long series of small decisions that trade sovereignty for predictability.
For decades, Carney acknowledges, that bargain made sense. American hegemony provided public goods: open sea lanes, stable finance, collective security. The rules were uneven, but the system delivered enough stability that middle powers could live with the hypocrisy.⁷
So they placed the sign in the window.
“We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.”¹
That era, he says, is over.
Crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics exposed how fragile extreme integration had become. Then something more deliberate happened. Great powers began using that integration itself as leverage. You cannot pretend mutual benefit when dependence becomes subordination.
This is where Carney rewrites the meaning of sovereignty.
Not formal independence.
Not flags or speeches.
But, as he frames it, the ability to absorb pressure without breaking.¹
A country that cannot feed itself, fuel itself, finance itself, or defend itself has few real choices when coercion arrives. When rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself. Yet Carney refuses the easy answer. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, less sustainable. Autonomy costs money. Redundancy costs efficiency. Insurance costs growth.⁸
Then he delivers the line that sounds less like moral philosophy and more like risk analysis.
“Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships.”¹
Dependence triggers hedging. Allies diversify. They buy insurance not out of ideology but out of fear.
This is where his proposal becomes practical.
Carney does not trust the old institutions to move fast enough. He does not believe universal consensus is coming back. Instead, he proposes overlapping coalitions—what he calls variable geometry—different alliances for different problems, designed to let middle powers bargain from something closer to strength.¹
In a world where bilateral negotiation with a hegemon is negotiation from weakness, middle powers must combine or be played off against one another.