I

Now the wording above is not how the overpraised leader of the Settler State of Canada has described our Present State of course, rather he referred to the end of a pleasant fiction. And he is correct about the ending of a fiction, though not about its having been pleasant. Let us keep in mind as we turn to his speech, that we should always be cautious when the elites start mixing Truths into their accustomed Lies, because it means the start of a new and improved Set of Lies.

It is striking that after a lazy reference to Thucydides—as Macdara likes to say, beware men quoting Greeks—that Carney sets up his thesis via a story about living under existing socialism, a story taken from Vaclav Havel, Czech dissident turned cheerleader for War Crimes (thereby providing lamentable evidence for the argument that the human rights dissidents in the countries of existing socialism were proxies for capitalo-imperialist interests). He uses this story to set up his claim that we have been liars and fraudsters, wanting the economic goods of US Imperialism; though he styles these as public goods, look at his list: “open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes”. What ordinary person, asked to name a public good, responds immediately with open sea lanes? And then works their way through this creepy list, remembering in the end to add “oh and of course support for frameworks for resolving disputes”?

It is quickly clear that this is a man who cares about economics, not the sick, starving and dying, nor the already dead: he is clear that “the fiction was [too] useful [so] we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality”. Note that he is speaking here about the Liberal Right: the Left has always been able to speak to these gaps. This is why he had to start by going back to the Cold War: the presence of a strong global Left, albeit a flawed one, is what allowed them (Carney’s us) the pleasure of taking part in the lie of US-led capitalism: the pleasures of its material comforts and the pleasures of its violence (which a man like Carney will never admit to, but which is amply on display in his actual policies).

II

Then comes the bit the journalists like about a rupture, not a transition. But what follows that sentence is more interesting: the sentence just serves as a platform for a long passage about economic integration and disintegration. We realise that this is a man capable only of talking about insurance and investments.

If great powers abandon even the pretence of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate. 

This reads to your correspondent like a plea to return to the pretence of rules: and how interesting to see transactionalism used positively! There is more of this kind of thing:

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 is horrible, the man cannot talk about life without rendering it in the most abstract economic terms. Consider this passage:

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.

In this last sentence he has given up even trying to sound like a person. He is speaking in shorthand, in code. This is not a speech for what we might loosely call ordinary people.