“For all power given with trust for the attaining an end, being limited by that end, whenever that end is manifestly neglected, or opposed, the trust must necessarily be forfeited, and the power devolve into the hands of those that gave it…”
— John Locke, Second Treatise of Government (1690)
In January 2026, from the auspicious podium at Davos, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared the death of a global illusion. “The rules-based international order is fading,” he announced, invoking Václav Havel’s greengrocer who hangs a hollow slogan in his window to avoid trouble. “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 rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.” For decades, nations played along with this “pleasant fiction,” praising principles while knowing the strong bent the rules when it suited them. Now, amid great power rivalry and weaponized supply chains, the charade crumbles.
Carney’s words weren’t just a eulogy; they signaled a rupture echoing far beyond geopolitics—into the heart of domestic distrust. A distrust that has guided President Trump’s second term policies and priorities at home and abroad. So, to be fair, Carney only said out loud what Trump recognized long ago and even built into his agenda as operating assumptions (e.g. his long-standing criticisms of the UN’s ineffectiveness, pulling out of the Paris Accords, and insistence that NATO allies meet defense-spending commitments, etc.).
But, pay close attention and you’ll begin to notice that this global erosion isn’t isolated at the top. It’s a fractal pattern, repeating at every scale: from multilateral bodies like the UN to American state legislatures, local school boards, and even a two-party system that alienates its own voters. Yuval Levin, in his 2020 book A Time to Build, diagnoses institutions as having lost their formative role, devolving into performative platforms. “We have moved, roughly speaking, from thinking of institutions as molds that shape people’s character and habits toward seeing them as platforms that allow people to be themselves and to display themselves,” Levin writes, highlighting how this shift erodes trust. Martin Gurri’s 2014 The Revolt of the Public explains the mechanism: information abundance exposes elite failures, fueling skepticism. “Uncertainty is an acid, corrosive to authority. Once the monopoly on information is lost, so too is our trust,” Gurri asserts. And in the U.S., primary elections amplify extremes, leaving the moderate center sidelined—like mid-level powers in a post-rules world.
There is a growing lack of confidence in the international order that mirrors the same decay at local, state, and regional levels. It’s not mere coincidence; it’s systemic, and it could likely be quantified and modeled by sharper minds than mine. Institutions everywhere have become hollow rituals, sustained by pretense until crises strip them bare. When the trust Locke described is manifestly neglected, power devolves—and the public, from global capitals to suburban districts, begin taking it back, often in ways we don’t like or approve of.
The Global Rupture: From Fiction to Force
The post-World War II order promised a world governed by rules, not might. Institutions like the WTO, UN, and NATO enforced norms—or so the story went. But as Carney pointedly remarked in his Davos address, this was always asymmetric. “Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration,” he said. “But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.” Nations participated in the rituals—joining summits, signing accords—much like Havel’s shopkeeper, “living within a lie” to reap benefits without rocking the boat. “The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source,” Carney explained, an apt observation from a PM of Canada—a country that has long been the beneficiary of such an arrangement. What Carney failed to include in his telling of this history is that none of these arrangements are new. Not one of them suddenly appeared in the past ten years, or even the past twenty.
It just happens that recent crises have shattered the facade. Multilateralism falters: the WTO gridlock, UN vetoes paralyze action, and so on. “The multilateral institutions on which the middle powers have relied—the WTO, the UN, the COP—the architecture, the very architecture of collective problem solving are under threat,” Carney added. A U.S. government that heeded the guidance of George Washington in his Farewell Address delivered in 1796, would never have assisted with (or insisted on) the creation of these organizations in the first place—but I digress.
Konstantin Kisin, in a January 22, 2026 interview on The Diary of a CEO, calls this order a “shared fiction”—a myth from Yuval Harari’s Sapiens, viable only under U.S. unipolar dominance post-1991. “Well, what you’re seeing is the final collapse of what people described as a post-World War II order, which then became the post-Soviet collapse order,” Kisin said. “And so that shared fiction that we had, which we were living in a structured world in which everything is done according to the rules, the rules-based order—you might have heard that term being used—that is now gone.” Without that enforcer, it’s “every man for himself.”
“Russia invading Ukraine was not an accident… It was a consequence of the fact that Putin and other people in his leadership team felt this was the moment to test the waters,” he noted. China’s Taiwan threats loom unchecked because “if China invades Taiwan, no one’s going to do anything about it, because there is no overarching authority with the military to be able to do anything about it.” Even Trump’s aggressive postures—hypothetical grabs of Venezuela or Greenland—reflect this raw power shift. “And Trump is acting in recognition of that reality. And he’s saying, ‘Well, given that it’s sort of every man for himself now, I’m going to do what’s in the interest of the United States,’” Kisin observed.
Middle powers like Canada feel the pinch most. Carney urges “strategic autonomy”: diversify energy, minerals, trade. “A country that can’t feed itself, fuel itself or defend itself, has few options. When the rules no longer protect you, you must protect yourself,” he stated. Canada cut taxes, fast-tracked trillion-dollar investments in AI and defense, inked deals from the EU to ASEAN. It’s “value-based realism”—principled yet pragmatic, forming “variable geometry” coalitions on issues like Ukraine or Arctic sovereignty. “To help solve global problems, we’re pursuing variable geometry, in other words, different coalitions for different issues based on common values and interests,” Carney explained. Nostalgia won’t suffice: “We are taking the sign out of the window. We know the old order is not coming back. We shouldn’t mourn it. Nostalgia is not a strategy, but we believe that from the fracture, we can build something bigger, better, stronger, more just.”
This international decay isn’t abstract. It cascades downward, eroding faith in analogous structures at home. Just as global bodies lose legitimacy when their severe asymmetry is exposed, domestic institutions suffer when captured by extremes or their masks slip.
Institutional Decay: Levin’s Call to Rebuild
Yuval Levin traces this to a deeper malaise. In A Time to Build, he argues institutions once shaped character and channeled behavior. Now, they’re platforms for personal performance: politicians grandstand for viral clips, academics prioritize activism over scholarship. “It still matters that we’ve fallen from that high, and we’ve lived through the experience of having our confidence in institutions collapse,” Levin reflects. The result? A “loss of confidence” where people treat institutions as hollow, leading to further decline. “The way that our Congress is meant to work reflects a deep understanding about how to deal with divisive differences well,” he notes, contrasting it with today’s performative dysfunction.
Levin’s framework fits the global scene perfectly. The UN, meant to mediate disputes, becomes a stage for veto-wielding powers to block resolutions. Similarly, at the state level, legislatures bog down in partisan theater, passing symbolic bills while ignoring infrastructure or education freedom. In regions like the EU, bureaucratic rituals persist even as Brexit and migration crises reveal enforcement gaps. The crucial missing piece to Levin’s analysis is that the long-revered institutions that need to be rebuilt have been corrupted and morphed into kabuki theaters for generations. Smartphones and Instagram didn’t make this problem. It was made long before that.
But, to continue the argument down another level, locally, this manifests in school boards and city councils. Once formative bodies building community consensus, they now amplify polarized voices—debates over curricula devolve into culture wars, alienating parents who just want functional education without indoctrination. I recently posted a thread on X that likened outfits like the modern academy or ACLU to JRR Tolkien’s Shire: “The modern academy, today’s ACLU, ‘The Hate Lab,’ and other perfunctory, childishly indulgent organizations and institutions are Tolkien’s shire. They whine and sigh obliviously in the shade of a rules-based international order that has already exhaled for the last time.”
They enforce speech codes or selective rights defenses, performing as if norms still bind, while real threats (like intelligence overreach) go unchecked. “I didn’t need a lot of help to be more skeptical of government, but this book is a depressingly thorough exposé on the most feared intelligence agency in the world,” referring to Tim Weiner’s “Legacy of Ashes: A History of the CIA.”
Levin warns this is a self-reinforcing cycle: distrust leads to disengagement, weakening institutions further. But his proffered solution—a return to those same institutions with a commitment to rebuild them—seems irrational, if only because of scale.
The Revolt of Information: Gurri’s Digital Awakening
What accelerates this decay? Martin Gurri pins it on information. In The Revolt of the Public, he describes how the digital age floods us with data, exposing elite incompetence. Pre-internet, institutions controlled narratives; now, leaks, videos, and threads reveal hypocrisies. “Lack of certainty isn’t ignorance: it’s a splinter of doubt festering in all we know, a radical disillusionment with the institutions of settled truth,” Gurri writes. “All over the world, elite institutions from governments to media to academia are losing their authority and monopoly control of information to dynamic amateurs and the broader public.”
Globally, this unmasks the rules-based order’s fiction. WikiLeaks exposed diplomatic double-dealing; social media amplified Ukraine’s horrors, showing UN impotence. Kisin notes crises like deindustrialization embolden enemies, as net zero policies weaken the West while China builds coal plants. Information abundance makes it undeniable: the system favors the strong.
At home, Gurri’s revolt scales. In U.S. states, budget scandals—NGOs siphoning taxpayer funds—erode trust. People like Mike Benz deserve our unending gratitude for documenting these “intricate webs,” where connected insiders divert billions to pet projects.
“The final nail in the coffin for me has been the incredible work of the inimitable @MikeBenzCyber. His documentation of the intricate web of NGOs that siphon money away from taxpayers and lenders to support connected individuals and govt programs has been absolutely heroic,”.
These exposures exemplify Gurri’s thesis: crises and transparency erode faith in top-down structures, sparking public revolt against unaccountable systems that prioritize connected elites over everyday accountability. “The public is always against, always bashing at the institutions without offering alternatives, an approach that logically leads to nihilism,” Gurri cautions. Domestically, this parallels the two-party system’s flaws—primaries that amplify fringe voices, alienating the reasonable majority much like NGOs divert resources from genuine public needs.
Local Parallels: From Shire to Reality
Zoom in further: the pattern hits home. Perfunctory institutions like the academy or “The Hate Lab” are Shire-like—oblivious enclaves under a collapsed canopy. Benz’s work seals it: NGOs as taxpayer-funded slush funds, supporting “connected individuals and government programs.” This local graft mirrors global aid diversions—UN funds misused while crises rage. State-level echoes: education departments captured by ideologies, eroding parent trust. Regionally, economic development boards promise jobs but deliver cronyism.
The fractal is clear: distrust starts at the local level, then bubbles up. A school board ignores input and alienates families, much like the UN wringing its hands but accomplishing nothing. Revolt follows—petitions, recalls, or exits to charters and education savings accounts.
Rebuilding from the Fracture
So, what now? Domestically, Levin urges recommitting to institutions’ core missions—an optimistic treatment plan. Gurri sees the public as drivers: harness information for transparency, not just exposure. “The qualities I would look for among elites to get politics off this treadmill are honesty and humility: old-school virtues, long accepted to be the living embodiment of wisdom,” Gurri advises.
It’s urgent. Kisin warns weakness invites aggression; He’s right. Much of the resentment from the power players at every level of the fracture stems from the unevenness of investment. It’s time to drop the pretense: name failures, build autonomy, and collaborate on values.
I share virtually nothing in common with Mark Carney when it comes to politics. But, he’s called a spade a spade and, for that, he deserves his due. The rules-based international order has died. I don’t mourn it. Now is the right time to begin to build a system of international relationships that George Washington would approve of and work our way down from the top while we clean out the corruption from the bottom, at the local level, and work our way up.
