A Solitary Cabin

The Greengrocer Removes His Sign

A reaction to Prime Minister Mark Carney's Davos 2026 address

There's a particular kind of grief that comes from watching something you loved become unrecognizable. Not the sharp grief of sudden loss, but the slow, creeping kind. The kind that accumulates in the space between what was promised and what was delivered, between who we thought we were and who we apparently became.

On January 20th, 2026, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney stood before the World Economic Forum and delivered what may be remembered as the moment the world stopped politely pretending. Drawing on Václav Havel's essay The Power of the Powerless, Carney invoked the parable of the greengrocer who places a sign in his window: "Workers of the world unite." The grocer doesn't believe it. No one believes it. But he places the sign anyway, to avoid trouble, to signal compliance.

For decades, Carney argued, the international community has been that greengrocer. We placed signs about rules-based international order in our windows while the powerful exempted themselves when convenient, while trade rules were enforced asymmetrically, while international law applied with "varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim."

"Friends," Carney said, "it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down."

And so they are. One by one.

The Rupture

If you're reading this from inside the United States, it may be difficult to grasp just how thoroughly our standing in the world has collapsed. Not declined. Collapsed.

A 2025 Pew Research Center study found that global confidence in U.S. leadership has plummeted, with many nations expressing low confidence in Trump's leadership of world affairs. A CGTN poll covering 38 countries found that 87% of South Korean respondents agreed that "America First" policy has led the United States to neglect its traditional allies. In the United Kingdom, Germany, Canada, Australia, and Italy, more than 70 percent of respondents expressed the same view.

This isn't just about allies feeling slighted. According to the Munich Security Conference's analysis, "U.S. unilateralism and diverging views on supposed common values have eroded trust." European allies are actively questioning whether the United States remains a stable democracy, whether they can regard the U.S. as a reliable partner, and some are reportedly developing "contingency plans for wars in which they might, for the first time in generations, have to fight against U.S. forces."

Let that sink in. Our allies are making contingency plans to potentially fight us.

A Brookings Institution analysis put it bluntly: "Trump's tariff policy is shredding global trust in the U.S. and risks driving friends and allies closer into China's orbit." The report noted that many tariffs breach U.S. treaty-based trade agreements, calling into question the value of all U.S. treaty commitments, including those relating to national defense.

So when Canada announces new strategic partnerships with the EU, when they sign 12 trade and security deals on four continents in six months, when they negotiate agreements with India, ASEAN, Thailand, the Philippines, and Mercosur, when they conclude new strategic partnerships with China and Qatar while we watch, we cannot claim surprise. We cannot claim betrayal. We can only acknowledge what Carney stated plainly: "We are no longer just relying on the strength of our values, but also the value of our strength."

They are hedging. They are diversifying. They are doing exactly what any rational actor would do when the guarantor of their security starts issuing tariff threats against Greenland and talking about seizing Venezuela.

The Hubris

There's a particular American narcissism at work here, a belief that we can do whatever we want and the world will simply absorb it. That our market size and military capacity make us indispensable regardless of our behavior. That allies will complain but ultimately fall in line because they have no alternative.

Carney addressed this directly: "When we only negotiate bilaterally with a hegemon, we negotiate from weakness. We accept what's offered. We compete with each other to be the most accommodating. This is not sovereignty. It's the performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination."

And so middle powers are building coalitions. Not against us exactly, but around us. A new trading bloc bridging the Trans Pacific Partnership and the European Union would encompass 1.5 billion people. Buyers' clubs for critical minerals anchored in the G7 to diversify away from concentrated supply. AI cooperation among "like-minded democracies" to ensure they won't be "forced to choose between hegemons and hyper-scalers."

The phrase "de-Americanizing world" is now appearing in serious foreign policy analysis. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace warns that "countries may be less willing to invest in or trade with the United States or continue to increase their use of non-dollar currencies" and that "there will be no return to the alliances, institutions, and U.S. efforts to uphold the rules-based international order."

The People vs. The Policy

Here is what keeps me awake at night: the world is responding to "America" as if we were a monolith. As if this administration's policies reflect some democratic consensus. As if we, the people, endorsed this.

We didn't. Not most of us.

Trump won the 2024 election with 49.8% of the popular vote. That is a plurality, not a majority. More than half the country voted for someone else or stayed home. His 1.5 percentage point margin was, as the Council on Foreign Relations noted, "the fifth smallest margin of victory in the thirty-two presidential races held since 1900." Had roughly 230,000 votes in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin broken differently, we would be living in a different timeline.

And since taking office? The policies our allies are fleeing from have never been popular with the American public.

A December 2025 CBS/YouGov survey found 63% of Americans oppose new tariffs on goods from other countries, with 68% saying they drove up prices in 2025. A Brookings analysis from January 2026 found that 75% of Americans, including 56% of Republicans, believe tariffs are raising prices. Only 14% support imposing additional tariffs.

Pew Research Center found in August 2025 that 61% of Americans disapprove of Trump's tariff policies. A Navigator Research poll found that opposition to Trump's tariff plan reached 56%, an increase of 15 points since just prior to inauguration. Two-thirds say his policies have already caused costs to go up.

A January 2026 New York Times/Siena poll found Trump's approval underwater at 40-56%. By 55-42%, Americans say his year has been unsuccessful. 49% say the country is worse off; only 32% say better. Majorities oppose the tariffs (54-38%), Medicaid cuts in the "One Big Beautiful Bill" (56-29%), and the U.S. running Venezuela (64-33%). 42% think history will see Trump as one of our worst presidents.

YouGov polling from November 2025 found that Americans are more likely to favor the U.S. increasing trade with foreign countries than decreasing it (42% vs. 11%). A majority (55%) think foreign trade makes the average American better off. Three-quarters say they've paid higher prices as a result of Trump's tariffs.

We are watching the destruction of American soft power, the unraveling of alliances that took 80 years to build, the conversion of friends into hedging neutrals and neutrals into partners of our adversaries. And most Americans don't want any of it.

Nostalgia Is Not a Strategy

Carney was careful to note that "we shouldn't mourn" the old order. "Nostalgia is not a strategy." He's right. The fiction was always a fiction. American hegemony did provide public goods, but it also exempted itself from its own rules whenever convenient. The rules-based international order was always a partial truth.

But the alternative currently on offer, a world of fortresses where the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must, is worse. Carney knows this: "A world of fortresses will be poorer, more fragile and less sustainable."

So the middle powers are trying something else. Variable geometry coalitions. Dense webs of connections across trade, investment, and culture. Shared standards to reduce fragmentation. Collective investments in resilience. They're building not against the reality of great power rivalry but around it, trying to construct islands of cooperation in an increasingly transactional sea.

"Argue, the middle powers must act together," Carney said, "because if we're not at the table, we're on the menu."

What's Left to Say

I don't know how to end this piece. There's no hopeful turn, no redemptive arc I can offer. The damage is being done in real time. Every day brings new headlines that would have been unthinkable two years ago. The seizure of Venezuela's president. Threats against Greenland. Tariffs against allies. The withdrawal from UNESCO, the dismantling of USAID, the systematic undermining of every institution that made American leadership something more than the mere exercise of raw power.

And the world is watching. And the world is adapting. And when this is over, if it ever is, there will be no going back to 2019 or 2015 or 2000. The sign is down. The fiction is dead. Our allies saw how quickly we could turn, and they won't forget.

Maybe Carney is right. Maybe from the fracture, someone can "build something bigger, better, stronger, more just." Maybe the middle powers can find a path that preserves the values we used to claim while acknowledging the world as it actually is.

But that path doesn't lead through Washington anymore. We made sure of that.

And for those of us stuck inside this country, watching helplessly as policies we never supported destroy relationships we never wanted broken, there's only the strange grief of being held responsible for something we never chose. Of being American right now, with all that entails.

The greengrocer removed his sign. But some of us were never holding one in the first place.

Note: The polling data cited in this piece represents the views of the American public at large. The policies being implemented do not reflect a mandate but rather the peculiarities of an electoral system that can hand power to a candidate without majority support, combined with a governance structure that has proven unable or unwilling to constrain executive overreach. We are not our government. Most of us, anyway.