Pedestrians walk in the street during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum in the Alpine resort of Davos in Switzerland. Photo / Fabrice Coffrini, AFP
In some ways, the scene in this picturesque Swiss resort town in late January is as ever.
The tall evergreen forest below the Jakobshorn peak is crowned with fresh snow. The small airfield up in the mountains is packed with private jets.
Phalanxes of black vans and SUVs crawl through icy streets.
Beyond an elaborate security cordon, pavilions representing many of the world’s most influential tech companies, industries and sovereign wealth funds populate storefronts, awaiting the foot traffic of the global elite who descend on this corner of the Alps every year.
Behind it all, though, there’s a profound shift.
President Donald Trump is leading one of the largest United States delegations ever to attend the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, where he is set to deliver an address on Thursday.
It’s at a moment when his Administration seems in open conflict with the paradigms that have long defined (and have come to be caricatured by) these conclaves in Davos.
His trade wars on US allies and adversaries alike are unravelling webs of globalisation championed here for decades. And his constant use of coercion in his foreign policy cuts against Davos’ ethos of comity and co-operation.
Trump’s speech will come days after he began threatening to impose fresh tariffs on European partners for their unwillingness to oblige his assertions that the US must annex Greenland.
He lashed out in anger at Danish and broader European obstruction over the weekend, guaranteeing that the Arctic territory would dominate conversation in Davos.
“We stand ready to engage in a dialogue based on the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity,” read a joint statement from European countries facing US tariffs over Greenland.
“Tariff threats undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral.”
Trump’s extraordinary capture this month of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro seemed to set new precedents, underscoring the White House’s view that the Western Hemisphere ought to be a US sphere of influence. A slew of prominent foreign policy thinkers see Trump ushering in a global order where “might makes right”.
“Gunboat diplomacy is back with a vengeance,” Comfort Ero, head of the International Crisis Group, a think-tank, recently said. “What do you do when international law becomes international niceties?”
The response from Davos seems more cautious and calibrated than it might have been in the past.
For more than a decade, the organisers of the World Economic Forum have warned about disruptions to the international order - of fractures, crises and dysfunction that can only be solved with collective global effort.
This year’s vaguer and more humble theme - “a spirit of dialogue” - may have been chosen in anticipation of the Trump-shaped wrecking ball swinging towards the forum.
“There’s a robust consensus that the world economy is entering some kind of new reality,” Mirek Dusek, a WEF managing director responsible for the annual event’s programming and business, told me.
“Our role is really to be helpful as an organisation, and in this moment bring protagonists together.”
At least to that end, Davos can deliver.
The forum’s organisers are touting record participation, with some 65 heads of state or government in attendance, alongside dozens more finance and foreign ministers, as well as close to 2000 prominent chief executives and business leaders.
They convene at a time, as the international advocacy group Oxfam notes in its latest report, when billionaire wealth grew by some US$2.5 trillion over the past year - a figure greater than the total wealth possessed by the bottom half of humanity (more than four billion people).
With Trump’s shadow over Davos, there’ll be little consensus over tackling inequality or perhaps any other shared global challenges.
The WEF’s annual Global Risks report, which surveys more than 1000 geopolitical and economic experts from around the world, pointed to “geoeconomic confrontation” as the prime source of short-term concern.
The WEF’s latest iteration of the Global Co-operation Barometer, an index using dozens of metrics to chart how the world is getting along, declared that “multilateralism is indeed waning”.
That zeitgeist is being driven, in part, by Trump’s political project.
“Trump’s central strategic insight has always been that America is better prepared than any other country to thrive in a cut-throat arena,” wrote Hal Brands, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think-tank.
“If Washington no longer wishes to sustain the liberal order or just can’t afford to uphold it against growing challenges, perhaps it makes sense to seize the largest share of the loot.”
But the conveners in Davos don’t want pessimism to prevail.
“Co-operation is like water, if it sees it’s being blocked it finds a way,” Borge Brende, a former Norwegian politician and WEF president and chief executive, said during a briefing call with journalists this month.
The world isn’t standing pat in the face of Trumpist disruption.
Clear signals were sent in recent days by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who acknowledged the shifting “new world order” on a trip to China where his Government reset a long-troubled relationship while touting a “new strategic partnership”.
Ottawa’s overtures would not have happened without a year of hostility from Washington, including Trump’s statements urging Canada to become the 51st US state.
“The global trading system is undergoing a fundamental change [reducing] the effectiveness of multilateral institutions on which trading partners such as Canada and China have greatly relied,” Carney told reporters in Beijing, gesturing to the deterioration of the rules-based order and the weakening of international institutions. “This is happening fast. It’s large. It’s a rupture.”
Separately, after a quarter of a century of negotiations, four South American countries sealed a free trade agreement with the European Union.
“This is the power of partnership and openness. This is the power of friendship and understanding between peoples and regions across oceans,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said alongside Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Rio de Janeiro.
“And this is how we create real prosperity - prosperity that is shared. Because, we agree, that international trade is not a zero-sum game.”
The new alignments that are emerging place Trump’s America in a conspicuous light.
“The US will remain the most economically and militarily powerful country in the world for several more years,” wrote international relations theorist Amitav Acharya, in an essay for Foreign Policy. “But it will be absent from, if not actively hostile towards, the existing international order.”
Acharya labelled this “unique configuration” shaped by US antagonism as “the world minus one”.
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