At the recent Davos meeting, Mark Carney told his audience that the “rules-based international order” is a “pleasant fiction.” He called the present “a rupture, not a transition,” and listed how power now operates: economic integration used as a weapon, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure deployed as coercion, supply chains treated as vulnerabilities to be exploited. Stripped of the language of “strategic competition,” this names how the West, under United States imperial power, has organised trade, money and resources for decades.
The West in this account is not a moral community or a settled group of core states. Critical scholars Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson describe it instead as a shifting formation built through institutions, security arrangements, payment circuits and resource infrastructures that decide who can turn land, labour and raw materials into realisable value and who instead lives in instability as everyday life. In Carney’s remarks, the change is that a G7 state is now spoken to in terms long used to discipline the global South.
US imperialism has never rested only on bases or overt interventions. It has relied on enforcing a particular kind of “development” that reorganised decolonising societies around financial discipline and participation in a global market on externally set terms. In the postwar decades, this took the form of developmentalism, with multilateral lending for infrastructure and industrialisation that deepened external borrowing and dependence on dollar funding.
When oil price shocks, interest rate hikes and recession hit in the 1970s, they triggered the debt crises that tore through the global South. The main financial institutions turned from funding national projects to stabilising global financial relations and opening Southern economies to accelerated resource extraction and export, using structural adjustment, conditional lending and privatisations to refit the state as a device for keeping payments to creditors secure and imposing austerity on populations.
The result is a durable pattern of abandonment. Subaltern populations in the global South, and racialised poor elsewhere, are kept in chronic precarity as work is made insecure, wages are pushed down, public provision is hollowed out, and households are driven into debt to cover rent, food and care, while police and administrative force contain the fallout so that external obligations are met. Abandonment means that these populations are treated as permanently available to absorb crisis and adjustment so that creditors, investors and core states can preserve their own stability.
The liberal vocabulary of shared values wears thin, while the operations that organise extraction, debt, labour and punishment remain in place and are being intensified
In this landscape, extractivism is an organising logic that links finance, territory and force. Extractive projects, sovereign debt and welfare retrenchment are fronts of the same work, turning social and ecological life into reserves that can be tapped without assuming responsibility for their reproduction.
“Financial infrastructure as coercion” describes key levers of this regime. Payment systems, sanctions and bank “de-risking” decide who can move money without constant penalty. Tightening dollar channels delays imports, raises costs and produces shortages, rising prices, collapsing real wages and new layers of household debt.
The Gaza “redevelopment” plan presented by Jared Kushner to Trump’s Board of Peace makes this logic explicit. In the slides, Gaza is redrawn as a controlled investment enclave with housing blocks, schools, clinics and tourist infrastructure along the Mediterranean, ordered around “free market economy principles” and the promise of full employment once “security” has been imposed.
Devastation is recoded as an opportunity for recolonisation, an enclave rebuilt under external supervision where capital is invited in on condition of pacification and political surrender. Land, shoreline and future revenue streams are organised for external investors and contractors, while a devastated Palestinian population in Gaza is invited back as regulated labour and consumers and those who do not fit this format are displaced or criminalised.
Taken together, these scenes show US imperialism recomposing itself rather than collapsing. The liberal vocabulary of shared values wears thin, while the operations that organise extraction, debt, labour and punishment remain in place and are being intensified.
Carney’s speech at Davos and Kushner’s slides on Gaza belong to the same repertoire: one instructs a state inside the West to live with pressures that were once kept at a distance, the other offers a devastated territory as a laboratory for control through enclaves, debt and securitised investment. Both assume that some lives can be pushed into permanent instability so that corridors of value and power remain intact.