2026 – The Year US Hegemony Ends?

Just a couple of hours after I wrote that I hadn’t yet seen the major agenda of Davos 2026, Canadian PM Mark Carney made a speech that suddenly made it clear.

So, what is the speech about?

It’s about how the US are bad guys, attempting to boss around the world through strength and nothing more. That the “rules-based order” is, and always was, a lie (sort of). That US hegemony is bad and must end. That countries should be independent (but also not really).

It is rambling and non-specific, alluding to ideas without declaration of a real position, save that the old way of doing things is over, and there’s no going back.

He sums this up with a closing line has a certain…familiarity:

we believe that from the fracture we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.”

Hmmm.

The takeaway is that this is an important speech. How do we know that? Well, because everyone is saying so.

“Mark Carney is emerging as the unflinching realist ready to tackle Trump”, opines the Guardian. The New Statesman agrees, headlining:

Europe has a lot to learn from Mark Carney – Europe must learn that it is time to reckon with what the US has become

On social media, everyone from Robert Peston:

Mark Carney: “The middle powers must act together. Because if we are not at the table we are on the menu”. You won’t hear a more important speech for some considerable time https://t.co/rTR8h7LsId

— Robert Peston (@Peston) January 20, 2026

…to Alastair Campbell (who can’t resist shilling his podcast as well):

Speeches still matter. A privilege to be there to hear one of the best – and most important – of recent times from @markjcarney yesterday. Others need to follow his lead. New @restispolitics ep recorded before his speech but all themes covered !!! Wherever you get your pods pic.twitter.com/jopDYX8RyT

— ALASTAIR CAMPBELL (@campbellclaret) January 21, 2026

Fluffing Carney’s supposed “realism” and “integrity” has become the hobby of everyone who fancies themselves a liberal, and this clearly signals a shift in narrative.

Even some who should know better are buying in, tempted to a mainstream agenda by Carney’s (rather disingenuous) denunciation of the “rules-based international order”:

A central, decades-old prong of the propaganda machine of DC’s bipartisan foreign policy blob — as well as their stenographers in establishment media rags like The Atlantic and The Economist — is that the US nobly acts to uphold the “rules-based international order,” which they… https://t.co/qBA6W54F4l

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 21, 2026

This isn’t a new or even an unforeseen development, but rather the evolution of an agenda that has been plain for some time.

In one of those mad MSM coincidences, just hours before Carney’s “important speech” in Davos, Gordon Brown was expressing the exact same thoughts in slightly different words in a column for The Guardian:

As Trump menaces Greenland, this much is clear: the free world needs a new plan – and inspired leadership

This column is, if anything, more explicit than Carney’s speech, “The idea that the liberal rules-based order can survive his presidency now seems complacent. This is a historic moment – and a time to act”, he says.

Adding “The real question now is whether the 2020s will be defined by the complete collapse of the order’s already crumbling pillars and the atrocities accompanying it, or whether an international coalition of the willing can come together to build a new global framework in its place.”

We know what this is. We have written, countless times, about the “end of hegemony” narrative and rise of new post-Imperial Global Order in its place.

In short, in order to enter a utopian post-national world, the old world has to be broken down and the old system discredited.

That’s why you’ll have liberal marketplace of ideas flooded with vague semi-concessions to the brutal reality of the US empire.

And that’s why you have Donald Trump strutting around the world stage playing the villain. Rambling about Greenland and asylums and peace prizes, precisely so the public will boo and hiss while chosen leaders for the globalist future can appear calm and articulate in their opposition.

It’s been a predictable for a long while, but 2026 may be the year the USA officially becomes “the bad guy”, a paper dragon for our globalist heroes to slay.

The old (imaginary) “rules-based international order” will collapse, and we will build back better.