“Today I will talk about a rupture in the world order,” said Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney ’87, speaking during the second day of the 2026 World Economic Forum summit in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, this week. “It is the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality, where geopolitics…is submitted to no limits, no constraints.”
Carney’s widely noted speech offered a sober assessment of the global landscape, arguing that the assumptions underpinning the post–Cold War international order no longer hold. His remarks signaled the possibility of an end to the world order made possible by “soft power,” a concept first coined in 1990 by the former Harvard Kennedy School dean and professor Joseph Nye in his book Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, written three years after Carney graduated from the University.
Nye, who joined the faculty in 1964 and passed away last May, had a transformational impact on the Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) and its students. His political philosophy and ideas on the nature of power in international relations influenced generations of policymakers, academics, and students and made him one of the world’s most celebrated political thinkers.
In his Davos speech, Carney returned repeatedly to the idea of belief. He argued that geopolitical stability has always depended on shared “fictions,” or assumptions that rules would be followed, institutions respected, and disputes resolved through agreed procedures rather than coercion. In this framing, the international order functioned not simply because rules existed, but because many states believed in them.
These assumptions could be defined as what Nye would call “soft power,” based not in military force or economic leverage (which would be considered “hard power”), but in the ability to shape others’ preferences through culture, values, and policies. In an April 2025 episode of the HKS podcast series “PolicyCast,” hosted by Ralph Ranalli, Nye defined “attraction” with an analogy of sticks, carrots, and honey. In this metaphor, sticks represent coercion, carrots represent payment, and honey represents attraction.
“In a democracy,” Nye said, “as we work with others, we actually are doing much more with honey—attraction—[or], soft power, than with hard power.” While in practice “we use all three at the same time,” he said, a country’s or a government’s ability to take actions “because they’re attractive” is, according to Nye, “worth quite a lot.”
Carney echoed these concepts in his Davos address when he stressed that, for decades, countries like Canada “prospered under what we called the rules-based international order.” Governments relied on institutions, international law, and “values-based foreign policies” to cooperate with others while maintaining sovereignty. Influence flowed less from force than consistent diplomatic discourse—precisely the dynamics Nye identified as central to soft power.
Dilion professor of government Graham Allison, the founding dean of HKS who also served as assistant secretary of defense in the first Clinton administration and special advisor to the secretary of defense under U.S. President Ronald Reagan, said in an email that “Carney’s speech captured what a big majority of NATO and European leaders and thinkers are thinking.”
Stephen Walt, the Belfer professor of international affairs, also reflected to Harvard Magazine that America’s soft power is changing in “multiple ways,” which could “undermine the ‘power of attraction’ that Nye emphasized, especially for other democracies.” In Walt’s words, America’s actions are “forcing medium powers [including Canada] to band together to create sufficient hard power to protect their own interests.”
Carney noted in his speech that soft power has never been a country’s only form of foreign policy. “We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false,” he said, “that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically.”
“Great powers now use trade, finance, supply chains, and tariffs as instruments of coercion rather than cooperation,” Carney said. “International institutions such as the WTO, the U.N., and climate frameworks are applied selectively and increasingly ignored.” As institutional credibility declines, he suggested, the capacity of soft power to shape behavior may also diminish.
