The Reassurance Trap

The Reassurance Trap: When Realism Is Rendered Consequence-Free

With Trump’s appearance at Davos, the world on edge, and the frontlines unstable, reassurance is once again being mistaken for strategy.

A growing number of Western leaders have begun to acknowledge what much of the political class still resists: the post–Cold War order is over. Power and sovereignty are again asserting themselves as organising principles of international politics. Realpolitik is no longer a descriptive tool or rhetorical posture. It is re-emerging as the default condition.

What follows is not a gentler system of norms, but a harder system of enforcement. Rules will matter again, not because they are invoked, but because violations will once more carry costs. Constraint will no longer be reserved for the law-abiding alone.

This is not a transition. It is a return to order on hierarchical, coercive and unapologetically political terms.

Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s speech in Davos 2026 reflects this reawakening. In that address, Carney warned that the longstanding post-war rules-based order is fading and called on middle powers to build strategic autonomy in the face of great-power rivalry. [1] Finnish President Alexander Stubb has defined “value-based realism” as the guiding principle of Finland’s foreign and security policy, an attempt to navigate systemic breakdown without surrendering liberal continuity. [2]

These leaders diagnose the causes of collapse with considerable accuracy. What constrains them is not ignorance, but an impulse to soften the implications. In order to preserve what they and their political consumers can still recognise, the current shift is framed as an evolutionary adjustment within liberal continuity rather than a structural break. Power politics is recast as a coordination problem among well-intentioned states, compatible with the existing order and unlikely to generate friction.

This move is intellectually dishonest. It converts a collapse of enforcement into a management problem and a return of hierarchy into a question of cooperation. The result is a form of realism stripped of consequence: analytically aware, politically soothing and strategically incomplete.

“As long as reassurance substitutes for reckoning, realism will remain performative. In periods of breakdown, that is dangerous.”

Carney is correct that the language of a functioning international order has become performative. Norms without enforcement decay into ritual. His use of Václav Havel’s metaphor, living within a lie, is apt given Havel’s description of ritualised compliance under authoritarian systems. The system endured not because it was true, but because a façade was mistaken for a foundation. [3]

But Havel’s insight was not managerial. It was confrontational by necessity. It concerned exposure, not optimisation. Once repurposed into the language of middle-power coordination, its function is reversed. The sign is removed. The structure that demanded it remains intact, sanitised and in use.

The breakdown is acknowledged, then neutralised. In its place appears the claim that middle powers, acting in concert, can restrain great-power behaviour and construct a third path between submission and isolation. This is presented as realism. It is a liberal reflex under stress.

Middle powers do not build orders on their own. They aggregate power through coalitions that function inside hierarchies they neither create nor control. Such arrangements can discipline behaviour internally and raise the cost of coercion externally, but they do not amount to sovereign enforcement or replace hierarchy. When interests diverge under pressure, coordination fails unless defection costs are imposed by an actor with the capacity and authority to do so. Absent enforcement, coalitions function only while alignment remains cheap. Once it becomes costly, legitimacy and shared values do not prevent fracture.

The same inversion appears in the treatment of legitimacy. Carney argues that legitimacy, integrity and rules retain power if wielded collectively. This reverses causality. Legitimacy is a result of action. Through the ability to enact it, it becomes a multiplier and amplifies power where power has already been exercised. It does not generate it. Treating legitimacy as an alternative to enforcement is not realism. It is moral continuity expressed in strategic language.

Liberal systems adapt first at the level of language. When material conditions deteriorate, narratives adjust. “Value-based realism” allows leaders to acknowledge breakdown while avoiding its implications. It preserves institutional continuity while signalling seriousness.

Carney and Stubb are correct that the old order is not returning. But as long as reassurance substitutes for reckoning, realism will remain performative. In periods of breakdown, that is dangerous.

John Sjoholm, for LIMA CHARLIE WORLD

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John Sjoholm is Lima Charlie’s Middle East Bureau Chief, Managing Editor, and founder of the consulting firm Erudite Group. A seasoned expert on the Middle East, North Africa, Europe and the Balkans, he has a background in security contracting and has served as a geopolitical advisor to regional leaders. He was educated in religion and languages in Sana’a, Yemen, and Cairo, Egypt, and has lived in the region since 2005, contributing to numerous Western-supported stabilisation projects. He currently resides in Jordan.

Lima Charlie World provides global news, featuring insight & analysis by military veterans, intelligence professionals and foreign policy experts Worldwide.

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