The Davos set arrives this year to find the liberal global order in retreat. With US President Donald Trump openly threatening allies, tearing at Nato and reviving imperial instincts under the guise of security, Europe is confronting an unthinkable question: whether the US is still a partner or has become a destabilising force. What emerges in the Alps is not a debate about reforming globalisation, but a grim reckoning with its dismantling – led, paradoxically, by the power that once guaranteed it.
Those arriving in Davos this week can be forgiven a pang of nostalgia. The World Economic Forum was once the annual gathering of “Davos Man”; a self-congratulatory exercise in neoliberal backslapping among the stewards of globalisation. No longer.
The experiment of global economic integration under a supposedly “rules-based” order is beginning to feel like a distant memory. No one will do more to underline that shift than Donald Trump. He arrives in the Swiss alpine resort with the largest US delegation in the forum’s history, reiterating histhreatsto take control of Arctic territory from Europe.
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“We are going to do something on Greenland, whether they like it or not,” he said. On Saturday, Trump announced an extra 10% tariff on six EU countries, as well as on Britain and Norway – all members of Nato – to punish them for opposing his desire to take control of Greenland. What began as a bizarre provocation has metastasised into the gravest crisis in the Atlantic alliance since Suez.
For the first time in decades, European officials are openly questioning the alliance’s future. EU leaders and their delegations, meeting Trump and US officials at the forum, have had to rewrite their briefing notes. Discussions on Ukraine have been replaced with what one senior EU diplomat has termed a policy of “carrots and sticks”; how Brussels might retaliate against the Greenland tariffs while still offering paths to de-escalation.
Retaliation plans include €93-billion in counter-tariffs and, should things really deteriorate, the EU’s Anti-Coercion Instrument, which would allow Brussels to restrict American firms’ access to the single market. That tool was designed with China in mind. Its potential use against the US is a measure of just how far things have fallen.
Even leaders thought to be closest to Trump, such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, concede that the era of strategic ambiguity is over. The old assumption, that US and European interests were at least broadly aligned, has evaporated. An emergency EU summit to survey the wreckage has now been hastily scheduled for when the Davos meetings have concluded.
The problem, however, is not merely tactical, but conceptual. “How,” wondered one European diplomat, “do you negotiate security guarantees with a man who treats alliances as protection rackets?” It is a fair point. Trump does not merely doubt the value of multilateral institutions; he seems to regard them as elaborate schemes to extract favours from the US.
One way to contextualise Trump’s America is as the endpoint of what might be called Israelification; the evolution of a state that comes to see law, restraint and multilateralism as not assets but encumbrances. The parallels with Benjamin Netanyahu’s Israel are becoming increasingly hard to ignore.
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