While Vladimir Putin’s regime and Donald Trump’s illiberal regression gallop backward toward a nineteenth-century narrative of Great Power empire-building, and the Global South tentatively lays the foundation for a twenty-first-century alternative, Europe seems mired in nostalgia for mid-twentieth-century neoliberal obsolescence. This year’s World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos might mark a point of inflection in this process. Despite Donald Trump’s discombobulated hour and a half rant at Davos and its geopolitical consequences, it was his concise, calm and measured tone that made Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney the star turn with his thirty-minute warning of “a rupture in the world order, the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics […] is submitted to no limits, no constraints.”
The Global South may have been bemused by his admission that “the international rules-based order was partially false,” “that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically,” “that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” At the same time, he called this a “useful fiction” because “American hegemony […] helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.” His conclusion was forthright and unequivocal: “This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
Carney then outlined the Canadian foreign policy response as rapidly diversifying abroad and helping to solve global problems by “pursuing variable geometry […] different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests […] building coalitions that work—issues by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together”. And yet the latter part of his speech became a defense of the values that defined the world order he said was gone: “We aim to be both principled and pragmatic—principled in our commitment to fundamental values, sovereignty, territorial integrity, the prohibition of the use of force, except when consistent with the UN Charter, and respect for human rights, and pragmatic and recognizing that progress is often incremental, that interests diverge, that not every partner will share all of our values.”
In a similar vein, Ursula von der Leyen justified the new EU-India Free Trade Agreement (FTA) in the context of solving global problems via variable geometry, saying that, “faced with a more fractured global order, Europe and India are showing that another way forward is possible—co-operation over confrontation,” because “this is not the time for nostalgia politics. The world will not return to old certainties.”
Carney’s and Von der Leyen’s analyses of the problem seem to stress the need for a radical change of direction, yet the nostalgia for “old certainties” remains, making it hard not to recall Tancredi’s comment in Tomasi di Lampedusa’s Il Gattopardo, “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” Asian analysts have been sceptical. Amitendu Palit of the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore clearly sees the EU-India FTA in geopolitical terms: “The deal is more than just about trade. It can be seen as a strategy for risk diversification and supply chain resilience, given an unpredictable United States and economic overreliance on China.” He also stressed that prior disagreements on trade issues, “such as those on investment facilitation, taxing e-commerce transactions, agriculture subsidies and intellectual property rules, continue to prevail”. In the context of “shoring up global rules-based trade,” Palit considers the agreement to be a symptom of “global actors with conflicting views on trade, especially from the Global North and the Global South, putting faith in in their abilities to thrash out framework rules” by working out mutually agreeable trade rules among themselves that “may motivate other global actors to collaborate deeper on global trade in their own strategic interests”. He ascribes the EU’s willingness to “bury the hatchet” to self-interest because the “atmosphere of uncertainty” around Trump’s policies makes diversification “absolutely essential […] that is the name of the game”.
Singapore’s Senior Minister Lee Hsien Loong warned that “the world economy will not return to the “status quo” that existed before the U.S. began imposing sweeping tariffs” and declared the “best framework is the world minus one”. At the Shanghai Cooperation Organization summit in September 2025, Xi Jinping had already warned that “global governance has come to a new crossroads” and emphasized that “all countries, regardless of size, strength, and wealth, are equal participants, decision-makers, and beneficiaries in global governance,” that “the house rules of a few countries must not be imposed upon others.” Xi has proposed a Global Governance Initiative (CGI, in Chinese全球治理倡议 Quanqiu zhili changyi), based on multipolarity that seeks new rules for a world order that are more favorable to the development of the Global South. This is the fourth in a series of global initiatives announced in recent years, the others dealing with security, development, and civilization. Together, they are stages in a strategy Xi calls a “community of common destiny for mankind” (人类命运共同体 renlei mingyun gongtongti)
It is not surprising that Asian voices are leading the way in proposing a framework for rebuilding a world order by reclaiming the narrative. The movement of non-aligned nations, inaugurated at the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung, Indonesia, under the coordination of Zhou Enlai and Jawaharlal Nehru, is finally coming into its own because the centre of gravity of world trade and demography is now centered in the Asia-Pacific region. Amitav Acharya, professor of International Relations at American University, Washington, says it clearly, “there is no return to U.S. geopolitical dominance or liberal hegemony 2.0” and calls this “The World-Minus-One Moment,” saying the time has come to construct a new world order by isolating the U.S. In “After Liberal Hegemony: The Advent of a Multiplex World Order,“ he calls upon the West to “stop pining for the return of liberal hegemony,” by which he means “the post-World War II world order created and dominated by the United States and centered around Western interests, values, and institutions,” and offers a blueprint to do so. His “emerging world order” is “not a multipolar world, but a multiplex world […] a world of multiple modernities, where Western liberal modernity (and its preferred pathways to economic development and governance) is only a part of what is on offer,” comparing a multiplex world to a multiplex cinema, “one that gives its audience a choice of various movies, actors, directors, and plots all under the same roof.”
This world of multiple modernities, reminiscent of the debate about “Asian Values” in the 1990s, will be anchored more by South-South linkages rather than North-South ones because the maintenance of world order depends on regional orders. This cuts to the heart of the debate about maintaining values that still lingers in the Western narrative. “The complexity of international politics today calls for a greater questioning of the existing theories and vocabulary of international relations, especially of liberalism and realism,” explains Acharya, because Liberal theorists “profess a monopoly over all ‘good things’ in international life, such as rationality, respect for human dignity, good governance, free trade, and rule-based order, and they trace the origins of these goods exclusively from Western civilization” even though “these ideas and practices can be found in other, non-European civilizations, including but not limited to Islamic, Chinese, and Indian.” From the point of view of the Global South, “liberalism is seen today as asking and expecting ‘the Rest’ to follow principles that it claims have been solely developed in the West, even as the leading liberal Western nations grossly violate them.”
In their attempts to reclaim the narrative, Chinese analysts have become more sharply critical of the Western monopoly on discourse that Acharya refers to. At the end of 2025, the Xinhua News Agency Social Research Institute, the think tank of the Xinhua News Agency, published Colonization of the Mind — The Means, Roots, and Global Perils of U.S. Cognitive Warfare. It analyzes U.S. cognitive warfare in depth, offering “a systematic examination of the history, practices, and perils of the United States’ colonization of the mind” to “shake off the blind belief in U.S. ideology, break its mental shackles, and empower other nations to better safeguard their cultural sovereignty, and advance mutual learning among global civilizations.” It exposes “longstanding activities of exporting ideology, promoting ideological infiltration, manipulating international opinions, shaping foreign nations’ perceptions” as “the tip of the iceberg of the United States’ global ideological warfare.”
Meanwhile, in an escalating word war, Deng Yifan, former Deputy Director of the Institute of World Development, a Chinese government think tank, has called upon Chinese scholars to break free from Western “discourse traps”. Another government adviser and Dean of the School of Public Policy at Chinese University of Hong Kong, Zheng Yongnian, has urged China to develop its own international relations knowledge system, rooted in its unique history, cultural traditions and geopolitical realities and distinct from Western frameworks that have established a monopoly on theoretical models and hijacked the narrative and the key terminology of geopolitics and geoeconomics. “For a long time, Western discourse held absolute dominance, and most Chinese scholars were educated within that framework,” he said, and China’s role in international relations has been viewed through a “Western lens dominated by theories such as realism, liberalism, and constructivism.” As global power dynamics change, Zheng argues, discourse power has become a key arena of international competition. This shift in focus corresponds to Xi Jinping’s call for a “Chinese Discourse and Narrative System” (中国话语和中国叙事体系 Zhongguo huayu he zhongguo xushi tixi ). Zheng has written that “China must take a leading role in shaping the ‘Asian narrative’ with an open and inclusive mind, invite more Asian scholars to engage, seek common ground and promote dialogue to push back against an entrenched dominance of Western discourse.”
The construction of a new or revised narrative that goes hand in hand with that of a new or revised world order must not lose sight of geopolitical reality. Although “pundits and political scientists have long anticipated the end of the United States’ unipolar moment and the rise of a more multipolar order,” Acharya warns, “the United States will remain the most economically and militarily powerful country in the world for several more years. But it will be absent from, if not actively hostile toward, the existing international order,” and concludes, “this unique configuration is not multipolarity but rather the world minus one”. It will be difficult to maintain global cooperation “in spite of Washington,” but if existing multilateral institutions “adapt, reform, and redouble their efforts […] successfully, the United States will one day be compelled to rejoin on more egalitarian terms.”
While the EU explores ways to practice strategic autonomy, Zheng advocates “the strategic urgency of intellectual autonomy” and, in The Once and Future World Order: Why Global Civilization Will Survive the Decline of the West, Acharya “shows how the West has never had a monopoly on order and that its decline could be a good thing for the world”, defending the ideas and practices that can be found in non-European civilizations. The West-Minus-One strategy of Carney and Von der Leyen may find common ground with the World-Minus-One strategies of “the Rest,” but the diversification and building of coalitions of the willing via variable geometry they propose will have to come to terms with the skepticism of the latter if it wants to ensure the success of a World-Minus-One. There are no signs that the US is willing to do so. The Global South is going its own way. The emerging order that Acharya proposes would eventually force the U.S. to return, but not on American terms. Canada and Europe will now have to decide how far they are willing to forego the U.S. and their obsolete narrative in order to cooperate with “the Rest” in a dialogue of civilizations that could claim or construct a different one.
Cover photo: A pedestrian walks past the US house during the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in the Alpine resort of Davos on January 20, 2026. The World Economic Forum takes place in Davos from January 19 to January 23, 2026. (Photo by Ina Fassbender / AFP)
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