Global politics has been bad for the world’s mental health for quite a while now.
Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 on the day when we were racing a century-old classic yacht in light airs on Auckland’s truly magnificent harbour.
The skipper passed on the news from his phone and, almost simultaneously, we learned of the anti-government Covid mandate march that crossed the harbour bridge that day that would go on to mar our national Covid response for long, and ultimately vicious, years thereafter.
We completed that race in a funereal silence. War, and unthinkable barbarity, has been there in the back of our minds ever since.
Statesmanlike leaders were confined to Netflix, real time authoritarianism tightened its grip and leadership looked like either a parade of human vanities or a Lord of the Flies game of Whack-a-Mole.
The first cracks in the global malaise came with Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s striking Davos 2026 speech at the World Economic Forum when he declared the post-Cold War rules-based international order over and dead.
Middle powers, he said, would need to unite against economic coercion from major global superpowers that had managed to weaponise economic integration, tariffs and supply chains, arriving at a permanent “rupture” rather than a transition.
“If we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu,” he famously warned. Smaller nations should stop relying on broken multilateral systems and instead form flexible, values-based coalitions. He also enumerated Canada’s vast mineral wealth and the quiet giant’s strategic shift toward boosting domestic economic strength, increasing defence spending and aggressively diversifying trade partnerships with radically new axes of power.
Shortly after, on a collegial state visit to Australia, Carney called for enhanced cooperation on critical minerals, defence and trade and announced Australia would join the G7 critical minerals alliance, the largest grouping of democratic countries with major reserves in the world. Combined, Canada and Australia produce 34 percent of global lithium stocks, 32 percent of uranium supply and 41percent of iron ore.
The two countries will be stronger negotiating together with superpowers including Donald Trump’s America, and acting as “strategic cousins” rather than competitors, Carney told the Australian federal parliament on the visit.
He reaffirmed the alliance between Ottawa and Canberra amid the “global architecture now breaking down from consecutive crises”.
“Canada is one of Australia’s closest friends, built on generations of trust, with a shared commitment to supporting stability across the Indo-Pacific and beyond.
“As our countries face new challenges and opportunities, we must deepen our cooperation with partners to promote our national interests,” he said, offering a solid endorsement of the Five Eyes intelligence sharing network, of which Canada and Australia are members, along with the UK, US and New Zealand.
Nature abhors a vacuum so it is reassuring that new and well-seasoned leaders are emerging from the soup of a broken world order that had toxified political engagement everywhere in the west and repressed wages and housing for working people using Reagan and Thatcher’s austerity model.
History will remember Volodymyr Zelenskyy whose oratory has created the platform for a new order, of course, and we now have both the swift and tidy switch of British prime ministers to former Manchester mayor Andy Burnham with a mandate for radical subsidisation of power to regions and districts and Zohran Mamdani as New York mayor raising foundational, yet previously unmentionable, issues.
And I found with a welcome sign of returning sanity in the US 10 days ago, when soft spoken Louisiana Senator John Kennedy repeatedly pressed Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth for “straight answers” on the cost of supplementary new defence funding of $US87.6 billion, the bulk of which would be directed to the ongoing conflict in the Middle East. The latest estimate of total costs in the Iran war so far is now $37.5 billion.
These online signs of wholesome collegiality and maturity in a fit-for-purpose world stage – untangled from the US military/industrial complex and the undoubted ability of wars to enrich the already rich – gave me a refreshing glimmer of hope on Sunday evening.
Ukraine’s sophisticated deployment of rapidly developed and home-produced drones had decisively decimated Russian air and sea defences to target oil supplies, power stations, weapons convoys and bridges, starving the Russian front line and bringing logistical chaos to the 45,000 Russian garrison in Crimea.
According to Al Jazeera journalist Mansur Mirovalev, who is based in Kyiv and has covered the war since it began, Russian civilians settled in Crimea since the 2014 annexation are panicking about dwindling food supplies, a nosediving economy and dire shortages of petrol after months of Ukrainian strikes on oil refineries and fuel storage.
“We are making history here,” a Ukrainian commander who had just launched his sleek grey biplane drone with its wooden propellers and tail, told The Guardian’s senior international correspondent Luke Harding. The men were waist deep in a field of sunflowers and after two more drones hurtled skywards, the small team would be gone in minutes.
The drone was capable of reaching Crimean or long range targets deep inside Russia with pinpoint accuracy.
“This is where democracy beats totalitarianism,” the commander concluded. “It’s like George Orwell. But this time Big Brother loses.” • Liz Waters
