The Epiphany of a Multipolar World at Davos
The World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos has, over the past decades, cultivated a reputation as the premier gathering of the global elite, as an event where one must be present and visible to count among them and to remain attuned to the great trends shaping the world. Alongside the annual meeting, the Forum has also become a prolific producer of influential reports and research, such as the Global Risks Report, which have become essential reading for decision-makers across the globe.
The Forum is open to all, yet it is far from neutral. Over time it has come to embody an ethos broadly favourable to globalization – indeed, often described as explicitly globalist. This worldview not only treats the shrinking and interconnection of the world as inevitable but also desirable and resulting in the need for supranational approaches to solving global problems. Such challenges, in this view, require coordination by a homogenized class of global elites drawn from the public sector, private business, civil society, and international institutions.
If George Soros has often served as the reflexive symbol of this ethos – particularly for its critics – then the World Economic Forum itself is frequently invoked as the institutional expression, and sometimes even the hidden puppeteer behind a range of increasingly contested transformations.
In recent years, roughly since 2015, the structural optimism traditionally associated with the Forum, reflected in the aspirational subtitle of each annual meeting, has gradually been replaced by a more pronounced sense of alarm. This shift has been fuelled by the “Trump phenomenon,” the fluctuating rise of populism across the West, Brexit, the backlash against globalization following pandemic-induced supply chain shocks, growing resistance to technocracy and governance by expertise, and attacks on free trade, liberal migration policies, and other long-standing “sacred cows” of the Western globalist consensus.
For several years now, the spectre of Trumpism has haunted Davos. Yet this year a striking shift has become visible. The risk had been that Davos might appear increasingly outdated in a period defined by the repudiation of old orthodoxies. Instead, its unique value as a forum bringing together politicians, business leaders, administrators, and journalists has made it irresistible even to those forces that publicly denounced it as a symbol of the very system they opposed.
Donald Trump’s presence at Davos this year—and the character of his speech—reaffirmed the Forum’s relevance as a space for debate and interaction. In fact, one could argue that the two most consequential interventions at Davos in 2026 came from Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney and U.S. President Donald Trump, whose speeches laid bare the growing divergence between the United States and its partners at a moment when a revisionist ideological movement has the opportunity to implement its ideas through the machinery of a superpower.
The “Great White North” strikes back
The speech delivered by Canadian Prime Minister and former Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney may well have been the most electrifying moment of the Forum. In a forceful address, Carney called upon the world’s middle powers to form coalitions capable of filling the governance vacuum left by a revisionist, transactional, and increasingly assertive United States, while also ensuring security in the face of revanchist powers.
The definition of middle powers is, of course, contested, but it would almost certainly include at least the eighteen members of the G20 other than the United States and China. India sees itself as a great power, yet Carney likely had precisely the Indian example in mind when considering how middle powers can compensate for limitations of size and capability in pursuit of geopolitical influence.
India’s strategy has involved a form of hedging: maintaining working relations even with its most important potential adversary, China, while simultaneously developing opportunistic partnerships to advance strategic projects. One such success was the recognition of India as a legitimate nuclear power by the Bush Administration and by the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which enabled the expansion of its civilian nuclear industry alongside its military capabilities.
For Carney, what he described as “a dangerous rupture,” “the end of a pleasant fiction,” and “the beginning of a geopolitics without limits or constraints” demands coalitions among states compelled by circumstances to cooperate on the basis of shared values and interests. Most likely these would take the form of flexible arrangements, variable-geometry groupings addressing issues ranging from environmental policy to war and peace, humanitarian crises, and other global challenges.
In some respects, this vision resembles the Alliance for Multilateralism announced by France and Germany in 2019. That initiative, however, lost momentum amid the pandemic shock and the expectation that the Biden Administration might restore the previous international order. It also appeared, in practice, as a club of the global North which made it unpalatable to the rising South.
Carney is articulating openly what many others already suspect. Yet the vision he proposes contains a strong dose of idealism. Normative superpower status is sustained by deep pockets, by substantial expenditures that cannot be easily recovered, and by the sacrifice of key interests. Indeed, it was precisely such sacrifices that contributed to the emergence of a hybrid left–right populist electorate in the United States and ultimately propelled the rise of Donald Trump, the providential figure for a movement of Middle-American Radicalism (as Sam Francis had termed it) that had been taking shape for decades.
Middle powers, even assuming we could define them properly (does Romania qualify?), are acutely sensitive to the costs and sacrifices they incur relative to peers at the same level. Their strategic thinking is often comparatively provincial, hence the persistent need for leadership and subsidies from the United States.
Canada itself is hardly the ideal country to launch such initiatives. Despite bold steps such as the EU-Canada Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement, Canada remains economically and militarily dependent on the United States and firmly embedded within the American geopolitical sphere, whether it prefers this reality or not. Regardless of any relative decline in American power, Canada’s strategic options remain tightly constrained.
For this reason, Trump’s early-term experiments with unilateral tariffs and coercive negotiating tactics were directed first at Canada and Mexico, two countries that will never escape the gravitational pull of the United States.
Shortly after Davos, Carney appeared to contradict himself by concluding a strategic partnership with China, a move that seemed at odds with his call for middle-power multilateralism directed toward Great Powers. The commercial conflict triggered by the arrest of Huawei executive (and daughter of its founder) Meng Wanzhou in Vancouver in 2018 continues to cast a shadow, even though she was released from house arrest in 2021 and the charges were settled with a fine in 2022.
Canada ultimately paid the price for a strategy and operation initiated by the United States. Yet at his inauguration in 2025 Carney himself described China as the greatest threat facing Canada.
Whether Ottawa is now playing a harder game ahead of the renegotiation of the USMCA free trade agreement in 2026, or has genuinely decided to recalibrate its China policy, Washington retains ample capacity to impose significant costs for such a shift, one that offers Canada relatively limited strategic benefits.
Gaining access to Chinese electric vehicles in exchange for the freer entry of Canadian lobsters, peas, and canola oil into the Chinese market hardly constitutes a strategic bargain. Chinese capital and migration flows into Canada have also contributed to the surge of populist movements that ultimately forced Justin Trudeau from office and might well have taken power had Trump not sabotaged the momentum with his inflammatory rhetoric about Canada as the “51st American state.”
A return to the economic status quo with China therefore appears to be little more than a temporary palliative, one that revives unsustainable trends without offering Canada any genuine escape from the American orbit.
TACO – Trump always chickens out
The second major moment of the evening was Donald Trump’s speech. Much of it was devoted to a catalogue of domestic achievements presented as benefiting the American people. These included highly popular measures such as eliminating taxes on overtime pay and tips, as well as proposals to prevent large investment funds from purchasing residential housing, with firms such as BlackRock having been widely blamed for the explosive rise in housing prices and the resulting difficulties faced by ordinary Americans seeking affordable homes.
Midterm elections in November traditionally deprive newly elected presidents of the congressional majorities required to fully implement their agendas. In Trump’s case, the danger is twofold. Even if Republicans retain control of Congress, primary elections could replace pro-Trump politicians with anti-Trump Republicans, generating stronger resistance within the party to the MAGA movement.
In any event, a president who uses a high-profile international platform to address domestic political issues is operating from a position of weakness, or at least of anxiety.
On the international stage, Trump reiterated his desire and, in his view, the legitimacy of acquiring Greenland, though he ruled out the use of military force. Negotiations following the speech appear to be moving toward a possible arrangement resembling the British agreement with Cyprus regarding the Akrotiri and Dhekelia bases.
The fundamental issues remain unchanged. These include not only Sino-Russian interest in the Arctic and in space-related infrastructure, but also the willingness of Greenland’s authorities in Nuuk to engage China for strategic projects, as they attempted to do in 2017 with plans for a new airport. From the American perspective, Greenlandic independence appears inevitable, meaning that any agreement with Denmark, formal or informal, carries an implicit expiration date.
Less widely noticed has been the strong American opposition to the United Kingdom’s plan to return the Chagos Archipelago, home to the critical Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean, to Mauritius.
It is therefore possible that the Trump Administration’s interest in Greenland, which became visible as early as 2019, reflects not merely Trump’s characteristic entrepreneurial opportunism but also deeper anxieties within the U.S. defence community about the long-term geopolitical sustainability of the overseas bases on which American power projection depends. In Greenland’s case, the island is also central to continental nuclear and space defence.
Equally overlooked were the remarks by U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent regarding the three Arctic shipping routes that are becoming increasingly navigable as global warming progresses. Two of these routes are effectively dominated by Greenland, which functions as an unsinkable aircraft carrier in the Arctic.
This may be the first time that the Arctic dimension of China’s strategic planning has been addressed not only by U.S. defence officials but also by senior economic policymakers, perhaps signalling the seriousness with which the Administration views the region.
It is worth recalling that as early as October 2025 Trump announced plans to acquire forty icebreakers, including vessels from Finland, and that American Arctic expansion dates back at least to 2017, when Obama-era restrictions on offshore drilling in Arctic waters were partially relaxed.
Conclusion
The World Economic Forum in Davos appears to be in the process of co-opting its critics in order to ensure its own continued relevance. Though it remains fundamentally globalist in both spirit and institutional outlook, the stage provided by Davos has become too important to ignore, even for populist or anti-system leaders.
This year’s subtitle for the Forum, “The Spirit of Dialogue,” was initially intended to frame discussions surrounding Ukraine and its partners in the context of negotiations aimed at ending the war. Yet the phrase has come to signify something far broader.
It now represents an invitation to explore forms of non-alignment among middle powers in the absence of the security and institutional subsidies once provided by Pax Americana. It is also an invitation to renewed dialogue between Europeans and Americans, each of whom often appears tone-deaf to the perspectives, needs, and arguments of the other.
One thing, however, remains certain: regardless of the direction the world ultimately takes, its major shifts will likely be announced, debated, and argued first at Davos—for anyone able to afford the minimum thirty-thousand-dollar price of admission.
Photo source: PxHere.com.
