Greetings from beautiful Davos, Switzerland—the Mecca of globalism—where the 2026 World Economic Forum (WEF) Annual Meeting is just wrapping up. This year’s Davos theme was “The Spirit of Dialogue,” but in retrospect, it might have been better described as “The Reality of Monologue.” President Donald Trump didn’t just steal the show; he was the show.
Every year, commentators try to assess the zeitgeist of Davos. My take is that people were on edge most of the week. The anxiety leading up to Trump’s speech on Wednesday was palpable, though his remarks produced a collective, if cautious, sigh of relief, particularly among the Europeans. There were glimmers of enthusiasm, particularly around artificial intelligence (AI). Witness the humanoid and canine-like robots walking along the Promenade. But unlike prior years when there was optimism for one region or technology or another, the balance this year tilted in the direction of concern over geopolitical risks, particularly those perceived to be posed by the United States.
Davos was in many respects a tale of two speeches: President Trump’s and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s. Both laid bare that we are in the midst of a great disruption and reinforced a growing belief that we must take the world as it is, not as we wish it were. Nostalgia is not a strategy; nor is hope.
What comes next? In Carney’s telling, we are witnessing “the end of a pleasant fiction and the beginning of a harsh reality,” a reality in which “the middle powers must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”
In pursuing this strategy, Carney and the European powers are by no means abandoning the United States. Rather, they seek to develop coalitions of the willing to forge a new geopolitical equilibrium. Derisking, a term originally coined by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen to describe the European Union’s strategy toward China, is now being deployed against the United States. Diversification away from the United States (certainly in trade and potentially in financial assets), development of indigenous defense capabilities, and long-discussed agendas of reform are top of the agenda.
Across the board, business and political leaders from every region have been shaken into looking hard at the institutions, norms, and processes that defined the multilateral rules-based system. While some still cling to a dream that the pendulum will swing all the way back, most increasingly realize we are not going back to the way things were before, even in a post-Trump period.
I sensed a rough consensus that leaders were abandoning strategies designed to change Trump’s mind and convince him that he’s wrong. They are focused instead on cooperating—bilaterally and plurilaterally—with each other to explore ways to exercise leverage in their relations with the United States and to lessen their dependence on it. But this approach requires difficult tradeoffs, particularly for Europe. It is unclear whether they have the political will to make the necessary hard decisions, many of which run across issues of underlying nationalism.
If past performance is any indication of future results, we are a ways away from European strategic autonomy or Canadian export diversification. The world is certainly becoming more polyamorous, but flirtation alone is unlikely to overcome the structural military and economic factors that bind much of the world to the United States.
Trump celebrates the end of the multilateral rules-based order created, maintained, and led by the United States for the last eighty years, but his vision for the future seems to be equally U.S.-centric. As Trump put it, “when America booms, the entire world booms. It’s been the history. When it goes bad, it goes bad…You all follow us down, and you follow us up.” And, looking beyond economics, the president’s convening of the Board of Peace in Davos, with the United States—himself—very much center stage, underscores just how much he sees continued U.S. engagement and leadership as critical.
It was remarkable that the entire confab’s agenda was hijacked by Greenland—a big, beautiful block of ice, only for the crisis to be settled apparently on grounds that could have been achieved without threatening invasion and creating a crisis within NATO. International relations are a reiterative game, not a series of single transactions. The risk of the Greenland gambit is that, however it is ultimately resolved, it might have done longer-term damage to the trust that underlies alliances.
It’s hard not to be struck by what was left undiscussed at Davos. Forget the issues of Davos past: sustainable development goals, global health, ESG. What about current geopolitics? Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, Venezuela, and Sudan received scant attention. The U.S.-China relationship, arguably the most important bilateral relationship in the world, was largely absent from the agenda, as were the major trade and fiscal imbalances that pose serious risks to the international system. Climate change used to be front and center. This year, the one climate hub that I saw was located ignominiously behind the food trucks on the Promenade. Davos is struggling, like so many others, to reconcile the important with the urgent.
There was some focus on the rapid advancement and diffusion of AI, both the potential benefits but also, increasingly, the public’s concerns about it. I was struck that, despite widespread recognition even among the AI enthusiasts that AI will create major dislocations in the labor market—with the economic, social, and political ramifications that involves—there was almost no serious discussion of what to do about it. The scope and speed of these challenges are difficult to understate, yet potential remedies are even more difficult to find.
Last year at Davos, a prominent American executive remarked to me that there was “less power in the air.” This year, power was everywhere you looked. A constant stream of motorcades brought the promenade to a virtual standstill. Security was tighter than at any point in recent memory, with heavily armed Polizei at every corner. In this sense, the WEF has put to bed any concerns about its convening power. The challenge ahead for the forum is to restore not just dialogue, but to forge action that truly does improve the state of the world.
Let me know what you think about Davos and President Trump and what this column should cover next by replying to president@cfr.org.
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What I’m tuning into this week:
