In an earlier article, ‘Lessons from Venezuela and Greenland’, I argued that American intervention in Venezuela might achieve immediate objectives while accelerating deeper changes that work against US interests. From Washington’s point of view, a change of power in Caracas reopens space for American and allied oil companies and helps pull Venezuelan exports back into dollar-based markets. In the short term, that looks like strategic success.
The longer view is less comfortable. The signal that such intervention sends goes beyond Venezuela. It tells other countries that deviation from dollar dominance carries political risk. As I noted then, for many states, that message encourages hedging rather than obedience. Dependence on a single system begins to look less like stability and more like exposure.
That argument matters more now than when it was first made.
What has become clear since is that the global system is not slowly adjusting. It is coming apart and being rebuilt in pieces. No one articulated this more plainly than Mark Carney at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Carney, speaking as Canada’s prime minister, avoided the usual diplomatic evasions. He said directly that the post–Cold War rules-based order had suffered a rupture, not a transition. For decades, he explained, countries like Canada prospered within that order. They joined its institutions, accepted its rituals and benefited from the predictability it offered. They also understood, even then, that the system was uneven. Rules were enforced selectively.
Powerful states found ways around constraints that were strictly applied to others. International law was not blind. Its force often depended on who stood accused and whether they were strong enough to escape consequence.
Carney’s point was not to mourn that system, but to explain why it endured. American hegemony, he argued, supplied public goods that made the arrangement workable. Open sea lanes, financial stability and security guarantees created enough confidence for middle powers to operate within their limits. That bargain, Carney said in Davos, no longer holds.
In his speech, Carney warned that what had changed was not just geopolitics, but the nature of economic integration itself. Great powers, he said, now use integration as a tool of pressure. Tariffs are imposed to extract concessions. Financial systems are leveraged to compel compliance. Supply chains are treated as points of vulnerability rather than shared assets. When integration becomes a source of subordination, Carney argued, the promise of mutual benefit collapses. In that setting, sovereignty ceases to be theoretical.
It rests on a country’s ability to withstand pressure from others.
That framing helps explain the behaviour now visible across several capitals.
Canada has begun openly arguing for cooperation among middle powers as a way of limiting exposure to coercion, while also pursuing pragmatic engagement with China. The UK, under Keir Starmer, has restarted high-level talks with Beijing after years of inconsistency. The European Union has concluded a sweeping free trade agreement with India after nearly two decades of stalled negotiations. These moves are often misread as ideological pivots. They are not. They are responses to risk.
Carney addressed this directly in his conversation with Financial Times foreign affairs commentator Gideon Rachman. Asked whether the old order could return, he said Canada regretted its passing but would not sit around mourning it. Instead, he explained, Canada was acting with others to build something new, incrementally and imperfectly. He pointed to existing trade networks that already connect vast populations and to efforts to link those networks in ways that reduce vulnerability. The objective, he said, was not exclusion, but resilience.
That logic is evident in the EU–India agreement. The deal creates a vast market governed by rules that neither Washington nor Beijing controls. Canada’s parallel moves on energy security and critical mineral supply reflect the same thinking. Australia and others are quietly aligning around similar calculations. This is not an attempt to dismantle the Western order. It is an effort to ensure against its weaponisation.
The Trump administration’s reaction has reinforced that logic. Allied trade diversification is framed not as prudence, but as betrayal. The withdrawal of the United States from dozens of international agencies, the openly transactional proposal of a ‘Board of Peace’, and the casual treatment of sovereignty, including talk of absorbing Canada or acquiring Greenland, have removed any remaining doubt. Middle powers see what is happening. Acting alone is dangerous. Acting together offers a measure of protection.
Carney captured that bluntly in Davos when he said that if countries were not at the table, they were on the menu. When institutions no longer protect you, he argued, you must protect yourself. That does not mean retreating from the world. It means engaging broadly, calibrating relationships carefully and investing seriously at home. As Carney later put it in a post that quickly spread online, nostalgia is not a strategy.
This is where the relevance for Nigeria becomes unavoidable.
In ‘Lessons from Venezuela and Greenland’, I argued that strategic autonomy depended on choices made internally. Energy diversification and a broader economic base are not abstract ideas. They determine how much room a country has when pressure arrives. A narrow structure leaves little margin for error. A wider one buys time and options.
The same applies to security. Internal stability is not an optional extra. Neither is the ability to understand threats and respond to them using modern tools. In a world where guarantees shift with elections elsewhere, these capacities are the minimum requirements of credible sovereignty.
Recent commentary applying Carney’s message to Australia translates directly to Nigeria. Like Australia, Nigeria has long assumed that global institutions and established alignments would provide a stable backdrop. Like Australia, Nigeria must now confront the reality that those assumptions no longer hold. The lesson is not withdrawal. It is seriousness.
Nigeria is not starting from nothing. It has human capital embedded in global institutions, visible in figures such as Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala at the WTO, whom Carney himself referenced as part of the remaining architecture worth defending. It has demographic weight and market scale that matter when used deliberately. What has often been missing is coherence and persistence.
China’s role in this evolving landscape is instructive, not because it offers a model to copy, but because it illustrates a different method. Beijing builds influence by tying trade to long-term financing relationships that deepen over time. The United States, by contrast, is increasingly focused on defending an existing system through pressure. As Carney implied in Davos, one approach looks backwards, the other is positioning for what comes next.
For Nigeria, the choice is not between Washington and Beijing, or between ideals and interests. It is between passivity and agency. Canada’s response to the fractured order shows what agency looks like in practice. It begins with honesty about power. It requires serious investment at home. It extends outward through partnerships built on shared interests rather than assumed protection.
The old order is not coming back. Countries that recognise this early gain room to manoeuvre. Those who delay will spend years adjusting to outcomes already set by others.
Nigeria still has choices. It has scale, people and institutional presence that matter if they are used deliberately. What is required now is not rhetoric about sovereignty, but the patient work of building it.
This sets out a clear position on the strategic choices Nigeria must make in a global order that has already changed.
Remi Ladigbolu, a journalist, writes from Lagos
Read the full article here
