Sorry, I didn't know we were discussing the very same thing on two threads, this and the Moral Insanity one! I must say, I think the name of that one is perfectly appropriate.
1 week ago
I should have said, I haven't read the Atlantic piece yet, I've only just got home, but it was the Fiona Hill stuff I thought ObWi people might particularly be interested in, not necessarily the rest. Also, there is a proper transcript!
1 week ago
And this is a gift link to David Frum's interview with Fiona Hill in the Atlantic today, headlined Why Trump Sides with Putin. As you know, I think he's worth reading for an insight into sane conservative thinking, and Fiona Hill is a truly impressive person.
Is Donald Johnson the same person as Donald of yesteryear? If so, it's really good to see you back.
Here is Carole Cadwalladr on the Carney speech. She also included a transcript at the end, which I have deleted. I hope I've taken out enough links so that this won't go into moderation:
A rupture, not a transitionMark Carney’s speech at Davos yesterday really is worth your time. It made some of the front pages today but the news cycle moves so fast that it’s already yesterday’s news. Part of the challenge of this moment - and I believe the job of journalists - is to focus on the signal, not the noise. And if you have time to take in one thing properly, this week, I’d suggest it’s this. It does what a great speech should do: it gives us the language to process and understand what is happening. It does so from a position of moral clarity. And it includes a call to action to what remains of the liberal world. It’s a huge relief to have a world leader simply naming what’s happening. That is the first step. But, it actually goes further in that it calls out the “lie” of the “rules-based order” that the “rules” were for some but not all. That’s been so abundantly proved by the global response to what’s happening in Gaza but it’s also not an outlier. America has been the world’s policeman and sometimes that’s looked less like a Victorian bobby on the beat and more like a beat-the-shit-out-of-you ICE officer and calling that out is a refreshing blast of honesty. He begins it with the story of a shopkeeper living under Communism from a book by Vaclav Havel, the Czech writer and dissident turned President. The news reports focussed on what Carney said about NATO’s article five but it’s what he has to say about truth that’s even more urgent and important.
“Every morning, the shopkeeper places a sign in his window: “Workers of the world unite.” He doesn’t believe in it. No one does. But he places the sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists — not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.
"Havel called this living within a lie. 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. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack.
“Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.
“For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We join its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.
“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 varied rigor, depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
“This fiction was useful, and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
“So we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
“This bargain no longer works.
Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.”
The end of the speech includes a call back to the Havel story:
“We are taking a 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 is the task of the middle powers, the countries that have the most to lose from a world of fortresses and the most to gain from genuine cooperation.
“The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending, to name realities, to build our strength at home, and to act together.”
“The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending…”I lived in then-Czechoslavakia in 1990. It was less than a year after the Velvet Revolution, and inevitably I read a lot of Havel. I’ve been thinking about that time recently, not least because of the great historical fortune I had to be young and free in a hugely exciting moment in which the world was literally opening up before us. So exciting that I took a year out of my degree to go and teach English to a bunch of sports journalists who worked for the newspaper affiliated with Havel’s party. It’s why I found Carney’s choice of story so interesting because I suspect that the book that this is taken from, The Power of the Powerless, is a text that is going to increasingly speak to us in the months and years to come. Words matter. That’s one of the central points of Havel’s essay. And also the outcome of it. After its publication in 1978, his idea that “living in truth” was both a radical and an achievable act reverberated across Eastern and Central Europe. This account, published by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, describes its direct galavanizing impact on Polish factory workers. We can’t respond and act to this hugely consequential geopolitical moment if we are complicit in the denial of our leaders and media. This is a week in which the world we have known has swung on its axis. We cannot simply carry on as if it’s business and normal. It’s why Starmer’s underplayed reaction is so deeply dangerous. We can all understand why, we see the reasons clearly, but not speaking the truth, now, is deeply corrosive. That is the subtext of Carney’s speech. And there is a deep and dark hinterland behind it. We’ve been lucky through a golden age of peace and prosperity but as he so clearly articulates, that age is gone. Ahead lies dragons. It’s why we have to listen to these voices from the past. In my newsletter on Monday, I said that the most powerful and on point thing I’d read or heard was an interview in the New Yorker by the conservative historian Robert Kagan. Given the inadequacy of the UK response, I emailed Robert to see if he’d speak to me about what we should be doing in this moment. This is the impromptu Zoom call I had with him which we published in The Nerve yesterday. It’s a quick watch or listen - 17 minutes - but like Carney he names what’s happening and he’s very very clear on the risks: to both the US and Europe.
So, utterly unsure where to post this but - I haven't been that keen on the Guardian's newish cartoonist, but this did seem perfect:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/picture/2026/jan/22/ben-jennings-donald-trump-board-of-peace-cartoon
Sorry, I didn't know we were discussing the very same thing on two threads, this and the Moral Insanity one! I must say, I think the name of that one is perfectly appropriate.
I should have said, I haven't read the Atlantic piece yet, I've only just got home, but it was the Fiona Hill stuff I thought ObWi people might particularly be interested in, not necessarily the rest. Also, there is a proper transcript!
And this is a gift link to David Frum's interview with Fiona Hill in the Atlantic today, headlined Why Trump Sides with Putin. As you know, I think he's worth reading for an insight into sane conservative thinking, and Fiona Hill is a truly impressive person.
https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/2026/01/david-frum-show-fiona-hill-putin/685690/?gift=cx0iluuWx4Cg7JjlT8ugCYlUR-Z45medwbxb50sy-dg&utm_source=copy-link&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=share
Is Donald Johnson the same person as Donald of yesteryear? If so, it's really good to see you back.
Here is Carole Cadwalladr on the Carney speech. She also included a transcript at the end, which I have deleted. I hope I've taken out enough links so that this won't go into moderation:
A rupture, not a transitionMark Carney’s speech at Davos yesterday really is worth your time. It made some of the front pages today but the news cycle moves so fast that it’s already yesterday’s news. Part of the challenge of this moment - and I believe the job of journalists - is to focus on the signal, not the noise. And if you have time to take in one thing properly, this week, I’d suggest it’s this.
It does what a great speech should do: it gives us the language to process and understand what is happening. It does so from a position of moral clarity. And it includes a call to action to what remains of the liberal world.
It’s a huge relief to have a world leader simply naming what’s happening. That is the first step. But, it actually goes further in that it calls out the “lie” of the “rules-based order” that the “rules” were for some but not all.
That’s been so abundantly proved by the global response to what’s happening in Gaza but it’s also not an outlier. America has been the world’s policeman and sometimes that’s looked less like a Victorian bobby on the beat and more like a beat-the-shit-out-of-you ICE officer and calling that out is a refreshing blast of honesty.
He begins it with the story of a shopkeeper living under Communism from a book by Vaclav Havel, the Czech writer and dissident turned President. The news reports focussed on what Carney said about NATO’s article five but it’s what he has to say about truth that’s even more urgent and important.
The end of the speech includes a call back to the Havel story:
“The powerful have their power. But we have something too: the capacity to stop pretending…”I lived in then-Czechoslavakia in 1990. It was less than a year after the Velvet Revolution, and inevitably I read a lot of Havel. I’ve been thinking about that time recently, not least because of the great historical fortune I had to be young and free in a hugely exciting moment in which the world was literally opening up before us.
So exciting that I took a year out of my degree to go and teach English to a bunch of sports journalists who worked for the newspaper affiliated with Havel’s party.
It’s why I found Carney’s choice of story so interesting because I suspect that the book that this is taken from, The Power of the Powerless, is a text that is going to increasingly speak to us in the months and years to come.
Words matter.
That’s one of the central points of Havel’s essay. And also the outcome of it. After its publication in 1978, his idea that “living in truth” was both a radical and an achievable act reverberated across Eastern and Central Europe. This account, published by the Hannah Arendt Center for Politics and Humanities, describes its direct galavanizing impact on Polish factory workers.
We can’t respond and act to this hugely consequential geopolitical moment if we are complicit in the denial of our leaders and media. This is a week in which the world we have known has swung on its axis. We cannot simply carry on as if it’s business and normal.
It’s why Starmer’s underplayed reaction is so deeply dangerous. We can all understand why, we see the reasons clearly, but not speaking the truth, now, is deeply corrosive. That is the subtext of Carney’s speech. And there is a deep and dark hinterland behind it.
We’ve been lucky through a golden age of peace and prosperity but as he so clearly articulates, that age is gone. Ahead lies dragons.
It’s why we have to listen to these voices from the past. In my newsletter on Monday, I said that the most powerful and on point thing I’d read or heard was an interview in the New Yorker by the conservative historian Robert Kagan.
Given the inadequacy of the UK response, I emailed Robert to see if he’d speak to me about what we should be doing in this moment.
This is the impromptu Zoom call I had with him which we published in The Nerve yesterday. It’s a quick watch or listen - 17 minutes - but like Carney he names what’s happening and he’s very very clear on the risks: to both the US and Europe.