Henry Farrell Decodes the Speech That Changed Global Politics
05 Feb 2026
When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stood before the World Economic Forum in Davos last week and declared that the world was facing “a rupture, not a transition,” the reaction was immediate and electric. For APB speaker Henry Farrell, an international-relations scholar at Johns Hopkins University, the shock was not just in what Carney said—but in who was saying it. “This wasn’t a radical or an outsider,” Farrell explained. “This was as establishment as it gets.” A former governor of both the Bank of Canada and the Bank of England, Carney has long been seen as a steward of the global economic system rather than a critic of it. That made his blunt assessment—delivered to an audience of political and business elites—all the more consequential.
Farrell, co-author of the book Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy, joined The Ezra Klein Show to unpack why Carney’s speech may come to be remembered as one of the most important foreign policy moments in years. At the heart of Farrell’s analysis is a concept he and his collaborator, APB speaker Abe Newman, have been advancing for nearly a decade: weaponized interdependence.
The idea is deceptively simple. As globalization deepened after the Cold War, countries became tightly bound together through supply chains, financial systems, and digital infrastructure, much of it anchored in the United States. For years, Farrell said, this arrangement worked because American power was exercised with restraint. Allies accepted dependence because it came with stability, prosperity, and a shared set of rules.
What makes the current moment different, Farrell said, is not just the use of these tools, but the abandonment of any pretense of restraint. “The liberal international order always had hypocrisies,” he noted. “But what we’re seeing now is something more naked—an assertion that power can simply be monetized, endlessly.”
The larger danger, in Farrell’s view, is that the United States may be undermining the very foundations of its own power. Hegemony, he emphasized, depends not only on strength but on trust—the belief that today’s partner will not become tomorrow’s target.
That is why Farrell sees Carney’s speech as more than a critique. It was an act of collective recognition—an elite acknowledgment that the old assumptions no longer hold. By invoking figures such as Václav Havel and Thucydides, Carney framed the moment as one in which silence and ritual compliance give way to open confrontation with reality.
“You can’t go back to pretending,” he said. “Once everyone knows that everyone else knows the system has changed, something new has to follow—even if no one yet knows what that is.”
What comes next, Farrell cautions, will be messy, expensive, and uncertain. But the alternative—clinging to a collapsing order through nostalgia—may be far worse. As Carney made clear in Davos, and as Farrell underscored, the rupture is already here.