The short era of US hyper-imperialism is rapidly crumbling.

Trump and his white Christian nationalist allies are dismantling the decaying international rules-based order that underpinned Western exceptionalism for the past 80 years — replacing it with McKinley-era aggression, mercantilism and territorial expansion.

US allies, like Canada and Europe, are grappling with this openly — most stunningly at the 2026 Davos conference. Meanwhile, while the UK and Australia remain utterly locked into a US sub-imperial role.

Here’s what Canadian PM Mark Carney said on 20 January:

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 varying rigour 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.

This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

Mark Carney, Canadian PM speech at Davos 2026

Carney was the former head of the UK and Canadian central banks, and a former Goldman Sachs executive. He is an ultimate insider of the global financial apparatus that underpins Western neoliberal capitalism.

This is a clear declaration that, among some nations within the US imperial system at least, the American Century is over. The weakened imperial core nations are circling the wagons in response to the rise of the Global South and China.

While a lot of reporting presents Davos and Carney’s speech as a family squabble between the US and its NATO allies, it is actually the culmination of 20 years of decline where the US can no longer dictate terms to the rest of the world.

The fiction of benevolent, liberal-democratic international US leadership has been exposed as the lie it always was. Carney is signalling to other Western nations to stop deferring to Washington and to seek ways to diversify slightly from the US economy. However, Canada, like Australia, is a resource colony for US capital; it cannot fully decouple without a real and catastrophic rupture.

His confession that the rules-based order under the US was and is a fiction is an expression of the neoliberal order’s consensus that Trump is a threat — a source of systemic risk — to the stability of the global financial system.

For example, his framing of aggressive US hyper-imperialism as providing “public goods” in the form of open sea lanes and “collective security” shows that he is not criticising the system. Rather, the rupture is from Trump permanently exposing the “useful fiction” as naked power grabs by US oligarchs.

When Carney talks about “subordination” of the middle powers, he is being honest about geopolitics but continues the lie in order to hide the subordination of nation-states to global capital markets that he personally helped architect as a central banker.

The solution from Carney is not cooperative internationalism but “strategic autonomy” — a retreat to dangerous, risky international real-politick of regional blocs that justifies domestic tax cuts for corporations, doubling of defence spending, and securing critical minerals and trade routes through ad-hoc “variable geometry” coalitions.

Shifting from globalised neoliberalism to national-chauvinist neoliberalism revives an old fiction and makes it look new: national oligarchic interests are presented as national interests. He cites “cutting taxes on capital gains” and doubling defence spending as the primary methods of building “strength”. The state’s role is to “de-risk” investment for corporations — Carney is wrapping tax cuts for the ultra-rich in the Canadian flag.

This international policy is intended to reinforce the domestic neoliberal order: great power rivalry disciplines domestic populations, suppresses wage demands, and justifies transferring wealth to private corporations and the military industrial complex. When he says “if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu”, he is using this as a threat against his own people to demand support increased military spending and corporate welfare.

While it is remarkable and refreshing to hear Mark Carney’s admission that the “rules-based order” was a hypocritical theatre, Carney’s solution — intensified military spending and corporate tax cuts — merely accelerates the crisis of financialised capitalism. The market alone cannot generate growth, so the state must direct public funds into private arms manufacturers — locking in powerful vested interests for perpetual conflict.

The inability for the US to impose a “universal” consensus across its sub-imperial allies like Europe and Canada is a real and probably permanent change in the global order. The US imperial core is experiencing a similar decline as the British empire. The sub-imperial powers now realise they must secure a share of the global plunder (strategic autonomy) independently of the US.

At the top of this post I said the collapse of the Washington Consensus was due to Trump and the white nationalists in his administration. However, Trump is a symptom of US decline — not the cause.

The structural forces, especially the failing profitability of Western capital, the rise of China, and the inherent contradictions of neoliberalism are the primary drivers of this collapse — as well as helping the rise of Trump and the far-right. The decline and collapse would still be occurring even if Trump were not president, although he is certainly accelerating things in a profoundly negative, dangerous manner.

Carney offers a choice: unite with our own national oligarchs to fight for a slice of a shrinking imperial pie, or build a new internationalism that rejects both US hegemony and Carney’s armed lifeboat. We must reject war capitalism and refuse to pay for the wars of the ultra-rich.