Time for Western middle powers to wake up

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney's Tuesday speech at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, was a wake-up call for Western middle powers which have blindly followed the United States policy around the world, including ganging up in abusing other nations.

Carney described the benefits the hegemonic US provided to the middle powers in the past. He confessed that 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 varied rigor, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim".

With the US threatening to impose tariffs, apart from threatening international organizations and the sovereignty of Greenland and even Canada, Carney believes the world is "in the midst of a rupture, not a transition". He advocated Western middle powers to diversify their relations from the US and seek strategic autonomy.

The big applause his speech received was a reflection that the audience, mostly Westerners, realized that they had been the subjects who praised the emperor's new clothes in Danish author Hans Christian Andersen's fairy tale while Carney became the little boy who told the naked truth.

The speech was quite straightforward for a leader of Canada, which is a member of the G7 and NATO. European leaders, whether at Davos or on other occasions, have been less direct in criticizing Washington even when the US has threatened the sovereignty of a European nation. It means there is still no answer to Carney's question whether middle powers would choose to "compete with each other for favor" from great powers or "act together with impact".

Carney made the speech when Canada and other Western middle powers were threatened by their master, the US. However, they did not call for respecting sovereignty and territorial integrity on January 3 when the US attacked Venezuela and abducted its president and first lady. Instead, many of them cheered the illegal US actions.

The same was true when US and Israel attacked Iran's nuclear facility in June last year, and when Israel committed genocide against Palestinians in Gaza over the past two years, with weapons mainly provided by several Western powers.

The list is very long just in the first quarter of the 21st century. Indeed, when you heard the flattering words for US President Donald Trump from NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte and French President Emmanuel Macron in the past days, many of them clearly still want to praise the emperor's new clothes.

Carney's speech is a rare confession of the hypocrisy and double standards adopted by the Western powers against the rest of the world, often through wars, regime changes, coercion, economic sanctions and smear campaigns, including against China.

The Canadian prime minister called on the middle powers to stop mourning the old world order and said Canada will be principled and pragmatic. That includes his visit to China last week, the first by a Canadian prime minister in eight years, building a new strategic partnership and repairing trade relations, all of which have suffered when Canada, under US pressure, adopted an unfriendly policy toward China.

If Canada and some other Western middle powers truly realize that they have wrongly sided with the US in committing so many crimes against other countries and peoples, they should immediately rectify them, for example, by removing the brutal sanctions against developing countries, sanctions that impoverish innocent civilians and crush the economies of other nations.

Carney called for a multipolar world, a world that China and many others, especially in the Global South, have urged for a long time. But how many Western middle powers have the courage to translate that into action is still an open question, given that their leaders sat quietly among the audience in the Davos ballroom when Trump touted his controversial world view and scolded them one by one, from Europe to Canada.

The author is a China Daily columnist.