How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

May 15, 2026

On Thursday, May 14, 2026, Mark Carney announced a National Electricity Strategy: a plan to double Canada’s grid capacity by 2050, unify the country’s fragmented provincial systems into a single East-West-North transmission corridor, and finance the entire buildout through a newly launched Canada Strong Sovereign Wealth Fund.

This is on the same day that Larry Fink stood in the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, part of Donald Trump’s delegation to meet Xi Jinping for a two-day summit on trade, Taiwan, and opening the Strait of Hormuz. The CEO of BlackRock — the financial face of the World Economic Forum — was in the same room with two hegemons who were negotiating over the fate of the world.

To backtrack a couple months, Carney told the Australian parliament in March: “Great powers can compel. But compulsion comes with costs — both reputational and financial. Middle powers must convene to matter, but not everyone can.” He wasn’t being modest. He was announcing the strategic retreat of the Davos faction that, five years ago, believed it would govern the world.

The Beijing summit is what the world looks like when Davos’s universalist project has failed.

The Ottawa announcement is the Davos faction’s response.

Variable Geometry

The core of Mark Carney’s middle powers coalition strategy is a flexible, “variable geometry” approach, building alliances based on shared values and interests rather than rigid structures. During his speech in Australia, he explained, “Canada is choosing to create a dense web of connections to build our resilience. We’ve adopted a new framework for engaging the world — variable geometry — creating different coalitions for different issues.”

Carney’s vision is to unite these “rules-restoring” democracies into a powerful economic and strategic bloc capable of ensuring their own security and prosperity. Uniting the middle-powers would theoretically bring over a third of the world’s global trade under one roof.

Variable geometry is code for “minilateral” agreements between handfuls of nations, the new vogue for post-unipolar Davos architects, that works by “bringing together the smallest possible number of countries needed to have the largest possible impact on solving a particular problem.”

Let’s forget about globalism.

Minilateralism has been a fashionable concept in foreign policy circles since Moisés Naím's article in 2009, where he said, “Let’s forget about trying to get the planet’s nearly 200 countries to agree. We need to abandon that fool’s errand in favor of a new idea: minilateralism.”

What's new isn't the concept — it's which faction is now embracing it. Davos spent fifteen years insisting on universal multilateral frameworks (Paris, WHO, ESG, OECD/BEPS, global minimum tax). Variable geometry is the opposite of that philosophy.

Carney insists this is "not a retreat from multilateralism" but "its evolution." This is the language of a faction managing its own decline. Every retreat in history has been described by its architects as a strategic repositioning. Variable geometry isn't multilateralism evolving — it's multilateralism conceding that universal frameworks cannot be built in a fractured world.

Prime Minister Mark Carney has established a trilateral AI and technology partnership with India and Australia, formally known as the Australia-Canada-India Technology and Innovation Partnership (ACITI). This is what Davos looks like after the Great Reset failed.

Carney and the Davos faction he represents recognize that survival is now the main strategy, because globalism has failed. The World Economic Forum's original "Great Reset" concept imagined highly integrated, cooperative global governance to manage planet-wide crises. Carney’s strategy acknowledges that this idealized vision has failed entirely.

Rather than leaning into the centralized global governance originally envisioned by the "Great Reset," the Middle Powers strategy represents a stark pivot away from that philosophy toward fragmented, competitive realism. Ultimately, it is a post-globalist defensive playbook. It swaps the grand, top-down integration dreams of early-2020s Davos for a decentralized network of regional bunkers designed to withstand superpower bullying from the U.S. and China.

The CPTPP-EU Bridge

The most ambitious plan is Carney’s efforts to create a “bridge” between the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the European Union. The bridge would link the CPTPP — Canada, Japan, the UK, Australia, and ten others around the Pacific Rim — to the EU's twenty-seven members. A 1.5 billion-person rules-based trading bloc, built explicitly to function without American participation.

Carney is forging deep bilateral and minilateral ties with key nations. He calls Australia and India Canada's "strategic cousins” — alliances focused on critical minerals (both are major producers of lithium, uranium, and iron ore), defense and AI. Australia has joined the G7 Critical Minerals Alliance, and the two countries reached eight agreements on uranium supply, AI, and semiconductors, with a commitment to double bilateral trade by 2030.

The broader “middle power” network is an expanded plan to attract other nations seeking to hedge against American and Chinese dominance. The coalition reaches toward middle powers across Southeast Asia, the Gulf, Latin America, and resource-rich Africa.

Rebuilt out of Europe

The “Rebuilt out of Europe” plan and Canada’s half-a-trillion-dollar military spending blitz are the concrete, hard-power components of Prime Minister Mark Carney’s Middle Powers strategy.

Carney argues that diplomatic agreements and economic coalitions mean nothing if they are not backed by raw economic security and military teeth. At the European Political Community Summit, he explicitly declared that because hegemons are weaponizing global integration, the international order will be rebuilt “out of Europe” via a combined, heavily rearmed transatlantic front.

Carney’s post-Davos worldview concludes that moral arguments have no currency in a broken international system. By rebuilding ties through Europe and arming Canada with a half-a-trillion-dollar war chest, the Middle Powers strategy transitions from an intellectual theory into a highly militarized, self-reliant economic fortress.

The faction that promised global integration is now building bunkers. Variable geometry isn't a strategy.

It's an admission of defeat.

For previous articles in the series:

The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

The Chinese Capitalist Party

Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking