| DAVOS, Switzerland — In the gray morning light of the Swiss Alps, global elites woke up to a new reality. President Donald Trump was back in the White House and had already made several statements of disruptive intent, issued executive orders that rolled back environmental regulations, pulled the United States out of the World Health Organization, and signaled new tariffs on goods from Canada and Mexico to be imposed by the end of the month. He directed the State Department to bring its foreign policy in line with an “America First” agenda. Trump will beam into Davos on Thursday to speak virtually to delegates at the World Economic Forum. But his return already loomed over many discussions. At an early session Tuesday morning, Walter Russell Mead, the right-leaning U.S. foreign policy scholar, gestured to a room of dignitaries and corporate executives and said that Trump’s political victory underscored how all those present are “losing.” Mead said that the spirit animating the Davos veterans in attendance — “the general kind of intellectual, professional, managerial people who thought history was over,” as he put it, invoking the paradigm of a triumphant liberalism popularized by political philosopher Francis Fukuyama — was in retreat. Their homilies to international cooperation, the threat of climate change and the virtues of globalization increasingly find less of an audience elsewhere. “Davos vs Washington,” declared an editorial in French daily Les Echos, pointing to the inescapable dichotomy between the gatherings of rich and powerful at Trump’s inauguration and here in the Swiss mountains. “Davos is, from an intellectual point of view, more and more irrelevant,” Julien Vaulpré, founder of Taddeo, a French strategic communications firm, and a former adviser to then-French President Nicolas Sarkozy, told me. “The agenda was to push globalization and free trade and so on, and that’s been done. Now, there’s a setback.” The Davos crowd, from fund managers to political leaders, are well aware of the shifting winds of global politics. “The cooperative world order we imagined 25 years ago has not turned into reality,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said in a plenary address. “Instead, we have entered a new era of harsh geostrategic competition.” Von der Leyen did not mention Trump once by name, but the president shadowed her remarks. The top official of the European Union knows Trump’s antipathy to the bloc — his distaste for its regulations, its liberal underpinnings, its methods of diplomacy, its eroding of national sovereignties in Europe. In response to Trump’s rise, von der Leyen extolled the centrality of the Paris climate deal (which the White House plans to exit again) and celebrated recent E.U. trade deals with Mexico and the Mercosur bloc in South America. The message was that, as Trump and allies threaten tariffs and deride the E.U. as an institution, Europe must be united and independent. “Continental scale is our greatest asset in a world of giants,” von der Leyen said, nodding also to China’s growing influence and power. “The rules of engagement between global powers are changing,” she added. “We should not take anything for granted.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was more blunt, laying out some open questions: “Will President Trump even notice Europe? Does he think NATO is necessary? And does he respect E.U. institutions?” he asked. Zelensky went on to urge the continent to “learn how to fully take care of itself,” boosting its military spending, its industrial capacity and political unity in the face of challenges elsewhere. Davos attendees from other parts of the world have less anxiety about Trump’s second term. An “America First” agenda was no problem, Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al Thani said, arguing that he wants “the Middle East to be great again,” too. Jumoke Oduwole, Nigeria’s minister for industry, trade and investment, looked forward to future dealings with the Trump administration and was not worried about the potential disruptions posed by his unorthodox foreign policy. “For us, it’s Nigeria first, it’s Africa first,” she told me. “We see this more in terms of opportunities. We’re not afraid; we’re not panicked.” Nigeria, like many other African countries, has close ties to China, but Oduwole stressed that it has little time for divisive bloc politics. “There are many interests competing for Nigeria and for Africa’s attention,” she said, pointing to her own nation’s wealth in hydrocarbons and critical minerals, like lithium. “We’ll be listening closely to what our old friends and new friends have to say, and the kinds of partnerships that are on offer.” Samir Saran, president of the Observer Research Foundation, an Indian think tank with strong links to the Indian government, said Trump is hardly to blame for some of the inequities that shape the global system and rankle many in the Global South. His transactional style of politics is refreshing for many outside the West, he said. “Trump’s arrival, in many ways, offers us an opportunity to reset the chess board and realign the pieces and create a new order and a new future,” Saran told me. Ironically, the representative of a great power who stuck to the traditional Davos script was Chinese Vice Premier Ding Xuexiang. He took the dais Tuesday and cast China as the reliable stakeholder in the international system, much like President Xi Jinping did eight years ago after Trump’s first election win. He described globalization as “an inevitable trend of history.” In a nod to Trump’s mercantilist instincts, Ding said that it was wrong to “channel the waters of the ocean” into “isolated lakes and creeks” and said that protectionism was like “locking yourself in a dark room.” A South American corporate executive, sitting near me in the vast plenary hall, turned to me and laughed: “Well, we’re locked in this one.” |
