The Most Important Foreign Policy Speech in Years
with Henry Farrell
1/27/2026
“We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition,” Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada announced last week at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
It was one of the most significant foreign policy speeches in years, sending shockwaves through the international community. He was describing a dynamic that’s been building for decades — what the scholars Henry Farrell and Abraham Newman call “weaponized interdependence” — that has now reached a tipping point.
I asked Farrell on the show to explain this dynamic, why this is a “rupture” moment and how other countries are responding. He is an international-affairs professor at Johns Hopkins University, is an author of the book “Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy” and writes an excellent Substack, Programmable Mutter.
Note: This episode touches on the clashes over immigration enforcement in Minneapolis and the killing of Renee Good, but it was recorded on Friday, before the killing of Alex Pretti.