When power speaks, order whispers

The 2026 World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Davos was formally framed around dialogue and cooperation. The tenor of leaders' speeches, however, revealed a starkly different reality. Heads of state and government largely acknowledged that the postwar international order is not merely in crisis, but structurally unravelling. The world, they concluded, is not evolving within a stable system; the system itself is collapsing.

The old world order is not coming back

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney delivered one of the most pointed addresses. He declared that the so-called rules-based international order — long the foundation of global governance — is at an end:

We are not witnessing a transition to a new system. We are living through the end of the old one

Carney also drew a direct link between values and power, insisting that values alone cannot uphold order unless backed by political will and capability:

Values do not defend themselves. They only survive when backed by collective power and political will

Carney’s intervention was significant not just for its diagnosis, but because it confronts the paradox of middle powers. Without collective agency, middle-sized powers risk being 'on the menu, not at the table'. Normative defence cannot be disentangled from strategic positioning.

Erosion of law and resurgence of force

French President Emmanuel Macron contributed a normative frame to this rupture. He claimed that the proliferation of conflict — including more than 60 ongoing wars globally — is indicative not only of security failure but of the weakening of international law itself. Macron warned:

When the law is violated repeatedly and without consequence, power inevitably replaces rules... A world without enforceable law is not neutral. It is structurally tilted in favour of the strongest

Macron emphasised that legal frameworks can only organise global order when they are effectively enforced and respected. This condition, he argued, is rapidly eroding, with a profoundly destabilising effect on multilateralism.

From multilateral ideal to strategic resilience

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen acknowledged that multilateralism — long the animating principle of European engagement — requires a shift toward strategic resilience in the face of structural change:

Dependencies can no longer be treated as neutral economic facts. They are strategic vulnerabilities

Von der Leyen underscored the need to work with partners on Arctic security and to invest in shared capabilities. Her speech reflects an implicit shift: leaders must defend multilateralism with tools and capacities, not rhetoric alone.

Raw sovereignty and the revival of power politics

US President Donald Trump delivered the most provocative Davos address. Rather than affirming rules, norms, or collaborative frameworks, Trump framed international engagement through unvarnished power and interest:

Peace is preserved by strength. Rules only matter when they are enforced... Sovereignty cannot be outsourced to institutions that lack power

Invoking US strategic primacy, Trump asserted a right to the territory of Greenland if Denmark refused to concede it. The media reported this as a revival of great-power sovereigntist logic. Trump may have ruled out the use of force, but his rhetoric resembled modern colonial posturing. European leaders responded with firm criticism.

From Europe to the Pacific: expanding fault lines

The systemic rupture at Davos is not solely rhetorical — it is also geographic. Multiple regions now define competing fault lines:

• The war in Ukraine continues to test collective security;
• Persistent conflict in the Middle East destabilises governance frameworks;
• The Arctic has emerged as a zone of strategic competition;
• In the South China Sea and around Taiwan, China’s assertiveness confronts established norms;
• The Indo-Pacific has become a locus of US–China rivalry and alliance recalibration.

These arenas are not peripheral — they are terrains where current and emerging orders are being made and unmade.

'The world is greater than five': an early alarm

Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan articulated a now-widely echoed critique of the postwar institutional framework. First stated at the United Nations General Assembly in 2014 — calling out the concentration of Security Council power in five states — Erdoğan’s refrain anticipated broader dissatisfaction with existing governance hierarchies.

At Davos, this critique no longer sounded like a peripheral grievance. Instead, it resonates with a wider recognition that representational legitimacy has atrophied.

Law and values: a quiet yet deep loss

One of the most striking elements of Davos 2026 was not open rejection of international law but its incremental hollowing-out. While legal norms continue to be invoked, their practical enforceability and moral force are increasingly undermined:

• Powerful states respect norms only selectively;
• Institutions previously seen as guarantors (WTO, UN) lack effective enforcement capacity;
• Legal language often coexists with overt assertions of unilateral authority.

This has fostered a divided legal reality in which norms matter differently for different actors; compliant for some, dispensable for others.

Policymakers and analysts voiced concerns that law without the will or capacity to uphold it becomes mere rhetoric. Order cannot endure on rhetoric alone.

Managed collapse or new beginning?

Davos 2026 did not produce a roadmap for a renewed international order. Rather, it captured a historical moment of systemic fracture. Leaders wrestled less with preserving an existing order and more with positioning themselves as that order dissolves.

The central dilemma is stark: will the world reinvent laws and institutions that reflect emerging realities? Or will it settle into an era in which power unmediated by law becomes the dominant organising principle? The answers will shape geopolitics for decades to come.

Image credit: Ciaran McCrickard / World Economic Forum. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

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