Prime minister Mark Carney has been the toast of the faculty lounge since declaring an end to the liberal international order last week in Davos, Switzerland. Such an order, to paraphrase Mr. Carney à la Voltaire, is no longer liberal, nor international, nor an order. 

Truthfully, it was always so. The postwar international order was a mega-multilateral aspiration, one with its own doses of realism, a world war in the rearview mirror, a cold war looming ahead. But perhaps, argued Mr. Carney, that order is now passing away. Perhaps it is time to consider a new way of doing justice—establishing right relations—in world politics. 

Mr. Carney describes this approach as “principled and pragmatic,” language that ironically echoes President Trump’s own National Security Strategy. Some have argued that the “Carney Doctrine” is a bit light on human rights, a bit heavy on realpolitik, and a little rich on commercial transaction. Others point out the intrinsic hypocrisy of Mr. Carney, still fresh from his visits to Qatar and China, implying broadsides against President Trump’s new world order. These are not morally comparable regimes, the critics say, even when set against the most chaotic and abrasive elements of President Trump’s foreign policy. 

I have a more sympathetic read of the Carney Doctrine, and it emerges from his use of values, a term integral to his political vision. In his book Value(s): Building a Better World for All (2021), Mr. Carney opens in a tone reminiscent of Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759). There is interest in banking and trade, yes, but also with those essential values that make world order and world markets possible, perhaps even just. He lists several: dynamism, resilience, sustainability, fairness, responsibility, solidarity, and humility. 

At Davos, Mr. Carney mentioned others (in French), arguing that like-minded states have “the capacity to build a new order that encompasses our values, such as respect for human rights, sustainable development, solidarity, sovereignty and territorial integrity of the various states.” He called such like-minded states a coalition of the willing—or, in a term that one feels could have used a little more workshopping, “plurilateralism.” 

I think the Carney Doctrine has much to commend it. But I want to offer a friendly Augustinian intervention on some of his terms. I want to argue, first, that international relations and political economy should be talked of not in terms of values but in terms of love. Second, I want to say that such states, such commonwealths of love, should enter into diplomatic arrangements seen less as contracts and more as covenants. Finally, while I believe we should and must speak of law, the Carney Doctrine’s more “minilateral” coalition of the willing would do well to think of international law and organizations more in a covenantal rather than a legal sense. 

The central animating feature of such an international system is not fear, not security dilemmas or the primal drive of anarchy, but love. It is love that binds our societies, that builds, that sustains them. This is no nostalgia, no idealistic gloss, no Band-Aid. There is no law, no army, and no leader who can force communities to betray their first loves. Not, at least, for long. 

International Relations Is for Lovers

Most entry points into justice in world politics start with the problem of anarchy and the nature of fear. Hobbes’ classic work Leviathan sees the modern sovereign state as the solution to the anarchy of the English civil war. As Henry Kissinger would memorably intone, if we must choose between order and justice, choose order, because there is no such thing as justice without order. Scripture does indeed bear witness to this. 

But I do not think that it only or even primarily bears witness to this. Fear, after all, is not a primary emotion. It is a responsive emotion, related to the more fundamental feeling of attachment, desire, and love. We would hardly fear a thing if we did not love something first. We fear for our lives because we love them. We fear injury or pain because we love our health, the ease and motion of our bodies. We fear collectively loss of power, wealth, and prestige because we love these things, and not always improperly. Power, wealth, and status are all needed in some measure for clean water, safe streets, profitable business, and raising children. But fear, then, is a second thing, not a first. It comes only after the Fall, not before it. It is a secondary response to the more fundamental thing that animates our politics and our commonwealths: love. This was Augustine’s argument. 

This is not to turn Augustine into a proto-liberal, although it is to note that liberalism as a political theory probably draws in part on the tradition of Augustine, and on Scripture. This speaks to the need for a kind of Hebraic inspiration, a biblical reimagining of the state and the state system. Eric Nelson argues in The Hebrew Republic that something like that was in the mix in America’s founding: not only the desire to write into law a separation of powers, as we find it in the Torah (see Deuteronomy 17:14–20), but the desire to write into a high law the great practices, truths, and loves to which the commonwealth is dedicated. What might we call such high laws? The Americans called it a Constitution, and most states in the world today have something like it. Here, argued the framers, is what we politically love, penultimate as it may be. Augustine himself argued that whether the commonwealth (state) was higher and lower was determined by the quality and order of its loves. 

To speak of love in the Augustinian sense is somewhat different from Carney’s values. Values are chosen. They are deployed, depending on circumstance, fit for purpose. They change. But love is rarely chosen. It is received. It is a gift. Even the great framers of the American Constitution recorded loves that did not ex nihilo arise from their own great intellect and virtue. They rather received, guarded, and grew the best of the English tradition, with its seeds in the Magna Carta, stretching further back still. Such an understanding of love reminds us of Edmund Burke’s argument that society is a partnership between not only the living but also the dead, and the as yet unborn. It is a way, I would argue, that fulfills the fifth commandment: to honour our fathers and mothers, so we may live long in the land the Lord our God has given us. 

Samuel P. Huntington actually tried to articulate something like this with his civilizational model. Huntington said that civilizations were defined by three core common characteristics: religion, language, and culture. Here he is adapting something like Christopher Dawson’s historiography, that “the great civilizations of the world do not produce great religions as a kind of cultural by-product; in a very real sense the great religions are the foundations on which the great civilizations rest.” 

But what we mean by “religion” does a lot of heavy lifting for Huntington. He breezily treats modern religions as civilizational stand-ins, and so we get world civilizations called “Islamic” or “Orthodox” or broadly “Western” or, problematically, “African.” 

But if we think of religion less in a modern social-scientific sense and more in a biblical sense as what we love, as what our hearts and societies are oriented toward, then we get something altogether more creative. We do not get systematic, comparative religious doctrine, but more anthropology. We do not look only at what people say but at how they live, what they do, and—increasingly today—what they spend their budgets on. Is America a Christian nation? We could fill a semester debating history and theology and politics. I’m more inclined to do things like follow the money in national and household budgets. Tim Keller suggests in Counterfeit Gods that the best way to identify our idols is to look at what we “love, trust, and obey.” An audit of our habits—financial and otherwise—yields more of what the Bible calls religion than all the political theology of the finest seminaries. Therein are loves that the most sophisticated public opinion polls cannot mine. Or, as the Gospel of Matthew puts it, where our treasure is, there our hearts will be also. 

This is one of the reasons the missiologist J.H. Bavinck encouraged Christians to consider the term “world-vision” not merely “worldview.” Worldview, he argued, suggests a systematic, comprehensive framework of the world. Few people could articulate such a thing. Even fewer societies could claim to have such a thing. But a world-vision, he argued, is a set of not always coherent but nonetheless quite fundamental pictures of right and wrong, of trust, of how things ought to be. It isn’t always philosophically or theologically specific. It rarely answers all the questions. But it is enough for people to go along, to do their work, to have an individual and even broadly collective picture of what sorts of behaviours and ideas are good and right, and which are bad and dangerous. Charles Taylor calls this a “social imaginary.” He writes, “Humans operated with a social imaginary well before they ever got into the business of theorizing about themselves.” This is also closer to what I think a biblical conception of religion might be. 

This was what I believe the great international theorist Martin Wight also meant in his own Systems of States by the “norms and values” that animate the system, and by his appeals to “Natural Law.” This invites us into a picture of anarchy that is less Lord of the Flies and more inter-commonwealth or, in its full meaning, “inter-religious” diplomacy. The hermeneutical clue to relations between states will be not only what they fear but what the bellicose bluster of fear is masking that is of fundamental, animating value to the other: What do they love? Or as the great modern-day diplomat Taylor Swift put it, undoubtedly parroting Augustine, “you are what you love.” 

Renewing the Covenant

Talking of love rather than values drives home a more primal politics. If we lose love, it breaks, or it dies, it is no mere change of conviction: when it dies, it takes a piece of us too. 

Augustinian politics, I think, demand not a banker’s contract but a lover’s covenant. Covenants draw us back into ancient Near East, a world more reminiscent of Hittite rituals and Assyrian steles than the Hall of Mirrors of Versailles or the geopolitical balance of Westphalia. But covenant has its place in modern-day politics too, as when we talk of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) or the International Covenant on Social, Economic, and Cultural Rights (1966), for example. Covenantal language, argue W. Christopher Stewart, Chris Seiple, and Dennis R. Hoover in their article “Toward a Global Covenant of Peaceable Neighborhood,” is about rituals of trust between deeply diverse parties. It is not simply the language of contract. After all, under conditions of anarchy, contracts are “unenforceable,” lacking, as they do, a sovereign adjudicator and enforcer. So, something other, something more than a contract backstopped by the force of sovereign law is required in world politics. This, they argue, is the ritual of covenant. 

“In our view,” they write, 

Jonathan Sacks, former chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, makes a similar argument. He writes that a covenant “is where we develop the grammar and the syntax of reciprocity, where we help others and they help us without calculations of relative advantage—where trust is born.” Such covenants, Sacks argues, “are beginnings, acts of moral engagement. They are couched in broad terms whose precise meaning is the subject of ongoing debate, but which stand as touchstones, ideas, reference points against which policies and practices are judged.” 

This definition of covenant functions as a verb: “covenanting,” a process, a diplomacy of dynamism and organicism, rather than a final settlement or structure. 

Reconsidering world politics as a kind of active covenantal process rather than settled, negotiated contracts drives us more directly into a diplomacy determined by the ordering of our loves. And it drives us, perhaps fundamentally, into that basic currency of politics at all levels: trust. Nowhere are the rituals of trust more important than under conditions of anarchy, and nowhere is the depletion of that trust more dangerous than the power politics of international relations. 

The Laws Among the Nations: Do These Ties Bind?

The problem with talking about international law is there is really no such thing. When we talk about “international law” we are really using a kind of analogy, a metaphor, and it has lately been too often confused for the thing itself. Law, as students of politics will know, gets not only its definition and content but also its application and coercion from sovereignty. Courts, lawyers, and legal scholars do their business under the umbrella of the sovereign state. Decisions and arguments have force precisely because of how that sovereignty is structured, using terms like “the rule of law” or “the branches of government.” 

So then speaking of international law seems immediately confusing. There is, by definition, no such sovereignty. But the domestic analogy, the idea that a more impartial, morally neutral, supra-sovereign entity called international law and its related organizations powerfully persists. In that persistence, argues Jean Bethke Elshtain, Immanuel Kant is “either foregrounded explicitly or lurking in the backdrop.” She writes, “The title of his great essay on ‘Perpetual Peace’ signifies Kant’s metaphysical ambitions. Peace that is not perpetual is a mere truce. A genuine peace must nullify all existing causes of war.” 

In such a world it is international law and international organizations that serve as the moral guardians of international justice. State power and state particularity are very often seen as the heart of the problem. The path to justice is therefore precisely in breaking, hedging, limiting state power, and entrusting it to these new physicians of world justice. But who are they? Elshtain concludes it is “a fantasy United Nations—quite unlike the one we actually have—and international law, universally accepted and endorsed and enforced—although their arguments are often rather thin concerning just how these laws are enforced and by whom. Given that the United Nations today is composed of delegates who lopsidedly represent undemocratic and corrupt regimes, this strikes me as not a terribly helpful argument.” 

Eric Patterson calls this “utopian multilateralism,” as though the treaty structures of the postwar era (1945 on), which we call “international organizations” or together “global governance,” are more moral and democratic in their capacity to solve global problems. But is this in fact true? Useful as some of these organizations may be, they are the day-to-day manifestation of underlying treaties whose authorizations, financing, and power is only as extensive as the treaties and the states that sustain them. They are not more democratic (often less so), nor are they in any meaningful sense more neutral or impartial. They are not “supra” sovereign, above states; they are sovereign-derivatives, the result of state diplomacy and treaty. Why would such mega-multilateral systems be preferable morally and practically to more bilateral or trilateral systems? Could we not talk, as some now do, of minilateralism, or, as Mr. Carney now does, of plurilateralism, rather than multilateralism? As the prime minister said, “This is not naive multilateralism, nor is it relying on their institutions. It’s building coalitions that work—issues by issue, with partners who share enough common ground to act together.” Could we speak of a D-7 (Democracy-7) or D-20 rather than a G-7 or G-20? Would organizing international action on the basis of democratic values and institutions be morally and practically inferior compared to organizing action on the basis of the size of an economy? 

When Mr. Carney talks about a rupture in the international system, I take him to mean that he thinks this mega-multilateral ideal of the postwar order is passing. That ideal was not stupid. The premise that more economic and political integration could turn former enemies into allies, into not just trade partners but into real friends that shared our loves, was one that was realized to an almost dazzling degree in Germany and Japan. Why shouldn’t it have worked in China, as Nixon gambled? Or the former Soviet Union? Or Iran? The list goes on. It was not a stupid idea. But it was wrong. 

It is now clear that geopolitical rivals are emerging that, benefiting from membership in that mega-multilateral order, do not share and do not intend to share its basic presumptions or ideals. This has caused that order to buckle, break, and it seems ultimately pass, if it ever truly lived. Mr. Carney is right: more effective progress, more direct diplomacy, on the great crises of our time, whether geopolitical or environmental or orbital, will be made among communities who have inherited a trust of shared political loves. 

A Davos Doxology

Michael Froman, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, implied that Mr. Carney’s and Mr. Trump’s speeches at Davos were a tale of two realisms. Realism has made something of a comeback in President Trump’s White House, in brand if not always in substance. We have relearned our Thucydides from White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller that the “strong will do what they can” and the “weak will suffer what they must.” Mr. Carney’s realism, too, has a kind of prudence to it, a kind of “variable geometry” of like-minded allies. 

Yet the Carney Doctrine, with some basic amendments, sounds less like the warmed-over paganism of Stephen Miller. Mr. Carney’s vision can be on the road to a kind of Christian Realism—taking not only the world as it is, with all its fallenness, but also its created design, its laws both human and divine. It has at its animating core not the derivative and passing purposes of power but a gesture toward the eternal, toward where our restless hearts find rest. 

It can be tempting to overstate the Mr. Carney’s anti-Americanism at Davos. But read in this way, in a more Augustinian way that trades values for loves, we recognize that no matter how obnoxious or abrasive the current mouthpiece in the American executive branch may seem, and no matter how shrill or sanctimonious the Canadians may sound, the American and Canadian people are friends. No symbolic arrangement on EVs in China or investment meetings in Qatar will change, can change, what a people are. Some trade, some diplomacy, on the margins is hardly a bad idea, but Canadians should be under no illusions, with a little recent history in Saudi Arabia and China to back them up, that in those regimes they will find fast, dependable friendships. 

If there are new blocs, revised NATOs, updated USMCAs, expanded NORADs, then they must be formed on the basis not only of responsible rhetoric but also of responsible action. In other words, friends should talk respectfully to one another. But friends should also act respectfully, and fulfill their promises—whether in trade or in defence. Canadians know we have work to do here. It is not enough to say what we love. Love is a verb; it is in the doing. 

The love of friendship, as C.S. Lewis memorably recalls, is open. It invites, it multiplies. It wants others to see what it sees, shoulder to shoulder. But it is not naïve. It does not imagine universal consent where it is clear it does not exist. It does not expect mere contracts to hold. It manages its most sensitive expectations, its supply chains, and its vulnerabilities—economic and geopolitical—with those it can trust. The quality and durability of that diplomacy is rooted in the substance of the relationship—trust proved over time, on the basis of an ordering of loves. 

On this, the Carney Doctrine’s emphasis on values and contracts and legalisms may be badly incomplete. But it seems to me with a few Augustinian amendments, it may also be on the right track. 

Parts of this article are drawn from chapters 7 and 8 of Christ and Covenant in Global Politics: A Christian Introduction to International Relations.