The “New World Order” Has the Same Old World Order Vibes

Photo by Daniel Lloyd Blunk-Fernández on Unsplash

This morning I woke at dawn because, for the first time in weeks, the sun shone through my window. It warmed my face and gladdened me after being absent from my days for too long. An hour later, like a gadfly parent, it disappeared behind the winter clouds.

The news of late is heavy-footed with ominous declarations, some terrifying, others hyperbolic. Today, during breakfast, after the sun had bolted from my window, television journalists led their top-of-the-hour broadcasts with declarations attributed to Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney that a New World Order was in effect because Canada had mended a few fences with China on trade and tariffs. No question, trade with China is a good thing, and they are perhaps less evil than the USA, given that the wealth divide between their richest and poorest citizens is less pronounced. China’s vision for an empire has a grand design to it rather than the one we live under, which is in decline- drowning in the decadence of the 1%.

I am less inclined to think this is the dawn of a new world order than an acknowledgement that the post-World War II rules-based system disintegrated during the COVID-19 pandemic. I and many others were aware, at the time, about how quickly the old normal was being replaced by a frightening and unrecognisable present tense.

---

I felt both my personal world and the world at large shatter in January 2020. I remember the day I was diagnosed with rectal cancer. I left my surgeon’s office in need of a drink.

I trudged to a pub where two men sat at the bar who looked like they had drunk from youth to middle age in that same pub, and now couldn’t remember where all the time and their hopes had gone. I ordered a whisky, drank it, and then ordered another.

On the television behind the bar, a 24-hour news channel reported the steady push of the coronavirus towards Canada. I looked away because I remembered, from a university history lecture, the devastation the Spanish Flu brought to the world a hundred years earlier. On that day, the apocalypse loudly knocked on my front door.

---

Inside me was a malignancy, growing and mutating cells, murdering me. I was ending as a person. The trajectory of my life was cascading quickly towards being buried in the soft ground. If I died in the next few months or years, no one would remember or mourn my passing. Too much death was coming for anyone to be able to absorb it rationally in their head.

Plague loomed for us like it had done in Athens during the time of Pericles, or Europe in the Middle Ages, or in 1918 for my grandparents’ generation. So many lives were about to be snatched from existence as if death were a debt collector. It changed our politics and made Western society not more compassionate but brutally accepting of mass death, numbing us to the erasure of democracy, civil rights, and workers’ rights in the USA, Britain, the EU, Canada, and Australia.

---

Fast forward to January 2026: Mark Carney’s pronouncements of a New World Order are less about respecting how things are and more about setting in concrete authoritarianism and capitalist exploitation of the many to enrich the few.

Let’s be clear: Mark Carney was educated at Harvard and became Governor of both the Bank of England and Canada because he was a reliable enabler of austerity against ordinary workers. He was made CEO of Brookfield not because he was a political or economic visionary but because his skill set is that of an efficient technocrat with the moral depth of Albert Speer.

Carney’s NEW World Order is like the refrain from The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again: “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” Carney’s politics and life’s ambition is to protect the status quo of extreme wealth. He is not Winston Churchill, willing to sacrifice the British Empire to save British democracy from Nazism at the start of WW2. He is the banker who will foreclose on the dreams and aspirations of the working and middle class if it saves the hegemony of the billionaire class. You will know when a new world order has arrived not by speeches, but when the world is in flames and war is on your streets.

---

Your subscriptions are a lifeline. Without them, I’d be in a very precarious position. Like so many, I struggle to keep afloat — made harder by cancer, lung disease, and other health issues, especially in this cost-of-living crisis.

If you can, please consider joining with a paid subscription — just £3.50 a month, or £30 for a yearly subscription (converted into your currency of choice). I promise the content is good, relevant, and thoughtful. If you can’t, that’s okay too — we’re in the same boat. Tips are also most welcome.

Take care,
John