Thank you very much, Larry. I’m going to start in French, and then I’ll switch back to English.
(French remarks omitted here for clarity.)
It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry — that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.
And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself. And faced with this logic, there is a strong tendency for countries to go along, get along to accommodate, to avoid trouble, to hope that compliance will buy safety.
Well, it won’t. So what are our options?
In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless, and in it he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?
And his answer began with a greengrocer.
Every morning, the shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world unite.” He doesn’t believe in it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists — not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.
Havel called this living within a lie. The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true. And its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack.
Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.
For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false, that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, and we knew that international law applied with varied rigor, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
This bargain no longer works.
Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration when integration becomes the source of your subordination.
The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied — the WTO, the UN, the COP, the very architecture of collective problem solving — are under threat. As a result, many countries are drawing the same conclusions: they must develop greater strategic autonomy in energy, food, critical minerals, in finance and supply chains. And this impulse is understandable.
A country that cannot feed itself, fuel itself, or defend itself has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself.
But let’s be clear-eyed about where this leads. A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile, and less sustainable.
And there’s another truth: if great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate.
Hegemons cannot continually monetize their relationships. Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty. They’ll buy insurance, increase options in order to rebuild sovereignty — sovereignty that was once grounded in rules but will increasingly be anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.
This room knows this is classic risk management. Risk management comes at a price, but that cost of strategic autonomy, of sovereignty, can also be shared. Collective investments in resilience are cheaper than everyone building their own fortresses. Shared standards reduce fragmentation. Complementarities are positive sum.
The question for middle powers like Canada is not whether to adapt to the new reality — we must.
The question is whether we adapt by simply building higher walls, or whether we can do something more ambitious.
Now, Canada was among the first to hear the wake-up call, leading us to fundamentally shift our strategic posture. Canadians know that our old, comfortable assumptions that our geography and alliance memberships automatically conferred prosperity and security — that assumption is no longer valid. And our new approach rests on what Alexander Stubb, the president of Finland, has termed value-based realism.
Or, to put it another way, we aim to be both principled and pragmatic — principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force except when consistent with the UN Charter and respect for human rights; and pragmatic in recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values.
So we’re engaging broadly, strategically, with open eyes. We actively take on the world as it is, not wait around for a world we wish to be.
(Further sections articulate Canada’s economic and defence strategy, diversification of alliances, and advocacy for middle powers acting in concert.)
Our view is the middle powers must act together because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.
But I’d also say that great powers can afford, for now, to go it alone. They have the market size, the military capacity, and the leverage to dictate terms. Middle powers do not. But when we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what’s offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating.
This is not sovereignty. It’s the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination.
In a world of great power rivalry, the countries in-between have a choice: compete with each other for favour, or combine to create a third path with impact. We shouldn’t allow the rise of hard power to blind us to the fact that the power of legitimacy, integrity, and rules will remain strong if we choose to wield it together.
Which brings me back to Havel. What does it mean for middle powers to live the truth?
It means naming reality. Stop invoking rules-based international order as though it still functions as advertised. Call it what it is: a system of intensifying great power rivalry where the most powerful pursue their interests using economic integration as coercion.
(Continuation details Canada’s domestic and international policy orientation grounded in this analysis.)
Thank you very much.
Centre for Nigeria Progress 