By Can Öztaş
The Casablanca line everyone remembers wrong is: “Play it again, Sam.” The film doesn’t actually include that. What Ilsa Lund says in the movie is quieter and more revealing: “Play it, Sam… Play ‘As Time Goes By.’”
That misquote is a perfect symbol of the 2026 Davos mood, because Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney did something mildly scandalous there. He described the “rules-based international order” the way most people outside the G7 Club have always experienced it: The strong exempting themselves when convenient. Trade enforced asymmetrically. International law applied with “varying rigor” depending on who the accused or the victim happens to be.
Many states, he said, merely “participated in the rituals” rather than naming the gap between rhetoric and reality. The bargain, he concluded, no longer works.
Some applaud the candor. Others want the old soundtrack back, not because anyone truly believes it was fair, but because markets and alliances “fo shur” function better when people pretend the rules mean what they say. The world is asking for predictability, for institutional rhythm, for “shared values” gently adjusted, for a system that never applied evenly. In other words: play the song we associate with comfort, the tune we can hum without thinking as time goes by.
If you are Turkish or from the Global South, none of Carney’s lines land as revelation. They are a delayed acknowledgement, without remorse on Canada’s part, delivered from the alpine showroom of global capitalism.
So, when Carney says the bargain has collapsed, Turkey hears something more precise: the bargain worked best when you were seated at the table on genuinely equal footing. For everyone else, the rules were always situation-dependent.
This is where Casablanca earns its place as a metaphor, because Davos is basically Rick’s Café with many panels. Everyone claims to hate gambling while quietly collecting their winnings. Captain Renault captured the ethos in one line: “I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here.” The performance of morality, followed by the collection of proceeds, is not a glitch in the system. It is the system itself.
TURKEY LIVES WHERE RULES AND EXCEPTIONS COLLIDE
Turkey, unlike Canada, does not have the luxury of discovering asymmetry in 2026. It sits at the hinge of regions and rivalries. It lives where the “rules” meet the “exceptions.” It has learned, repeatedly, that sermons do not stop gunboats, and that moral language is often the camouflage of power.
Turkey has been trained by history to recognise that “international law” is not merely a set of norms. It is also a border regime, a hierarchy, a gatekeeping system. The Ottoman capitulations were a legal architecture of unequal sovereignty. And the Ottoman state in the Concert of Europe system was never treated equally, the reality was containing the Eastern Question while its territories and futures were negotiated over. A similar outcome was to be experienced by the Turks after the First World War had it not been for Atatürk and his friends who changed the course of history.
That is why the early Republic had a cautious foreign policy that prioritised sovereignty and independence. “Peace at home, peace in the world” was not a bumper sticker. It was a survival doctrine. It meant realism, non-adventurism, sovereignty guarded without romantic tantrums, and a refusal to drift back into imperial overreach. In plain terms: the early Republic and for a long time the Foreign Ministry did not confuse dignity with drama.
WHAT HAS TURKEY LOST?
This hard learned instinct feels like a lost art now. Recent Turkish foreign policy often reads like a remake where the moral lines are delivered with more volume, while the bargaining becomes more explicit. Ankara condemns the system while remaining deeply entangled in it, and often benefiting from it. It speaks like an outsider while operating as an insider when it suits. It denounces the club and negotiates fiercely for better seating inside it. This may win domestic applause, but it rarely produces predictable and honorable statecraft.
The result is a foreign policy that oscillates between belonging and refusal: “we are part of the West” when markets and status demand it, and “the West is a club that cheats” when sovereignty and resentment are politically useful. It is not that both claims cannot be true. It is that living inside both, without a stabilising doctrine, produces something worse than hypocrisy: strategic incoherence.
And this is where the global point and the Turkish point meet. Carney’s late-stage honesty hints at a deeper provocation Davos still cannot pronounce: the crisis is not only that the rules are applied selectively. The crisis is that the same small circle still writes the rules, names them “universal,” and invites the rest to recite them with gratitude.
So play it Mark, but Davos doesn’t need more honesty. It needs fewer scriptwriters, more diversity and more co-authors.
*Can Öztaş, LL.M., Ph.D, recently retired from Turkish diplomatic service and currently teaches courses on foreign policy and international law at Bilkent University.
