U.S. President Donald Trump talks to media during the Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland on Thursday.Markus Schreiber/The Associated Press
Gus Carlson is a U.S.-based columnist for The Globe and Mail.
Love him or hate him, U.S. President Donald Trump has done the impossible – make the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland relevant again.
It was easier than it looked because the bar was pretty low. In recent years, the event had become a mediocre pseudo-intellectual trade show, struggling to create substantive and significant geopolitical and economic content but succeeding only in generating pap. It was like a live-action alpine LinkedIn, with people reposting other people’s ideas in an effort to seem smarter themselves.
But any time a world leader decides he wants to try to rip and replace the world power grid, as Mr. Trump is trying to do, people pay attention.
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Not surprisingly, he did it with his typical bombast. In his rambling remarks to delegates, he suggested European leaders loved him and called him “daddy,” reminded allies that if it weren’t for the United States they would all be speaking German or Japanese, suggested there was nothing wrong with the U.S. acquiring territories, and reiterated his desire to take over Greenland, though he backed off using force to do it.
Other world leaders, including Prime Minister Mark Carney, acknowledged that we are in uncharted territory and we aren’t going back, thus making the conversation at this year’s session meaty, memorable and meaningful for the first time in recent memory.
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Probably the spiciest line of the conference so far belonged to Mr. Carney, who suggested to the leaders of his fellow middle power countries that “we must act together, because if we’re not at the table, we’re on the menu.”
Good stuff, and not the kind of consequential fireworks seen over Davos in a long, long time.
As someone who has been to Davos several times over the years in my various corporate roles, the instant rejuvenation of the platform is remarkable to watch. I’ve expended more energy trying to convince serious C-suite executives not to waste their time there than cheerleading for them to attend the annual event in the terminally charmless ski village near Zurich.
Some of those executives, whose vanity overtook them like a cancer, craved the exposure of the forum the same way they walked the Caribbean beaches of St. Barts during the season hoping to bump into a world-changing multibillionaire or two.
Others, who put the interests of the business ahead of their own image-polishing, saw the event for what it was: a see-and-be-seen snow-capped series of revolving cocktail parties (sort of like Muskoka or Magog with flugelhorns) with program content that was more sizzle than steak.
Davos had become a caricature of itself. The corporate climbers and Deputy Ministers of Not Much trudged around with their phalanxes of fart-catchers in tow, striding importantly to plenary sessions about inconsequential things in the grandly named but thoroughly dingy Congress Centre that has all the charm of a North York hockey arena at 4 a.m. on a Saturday in January – and eating more cheese fondue than at a 1970s suburban key party.
As a colleague said to me once, it’s quaint without the “qu.”
In recent years, the celebrities had started to show up, a sure sign that any shreds of credibility the event had were soon to disappear. When Katy Perry, Leonardo DiCaprio and Bono are in the house and offering perspective, you can almost hear Logan Roy harrumph that these are not serious people.
The WEF brass would swan around and snap their lederhosen suspenders relentlessly to get people to pay attention to how truly remarkable the event was, even though it had lost much of its oomph. Still, the Very Insecure People for whom Davos was like the Oscars would swoon and kiss organizers’ arschbackens in hopes that they would get better slots on next year’s agenda.
The media – particularly the U.S. business media – would cover the sessions breathlessly as if they were newsworthy, but more often than not the ratings showed that viewers were wise to the fact that this was summer stock, not Broadway.
Davos’ giant step back into the spotlight is proof of two things: Every theatre needs a bad guy and timing is everything.
For many, Mr. Trump has become the villain on the world stage, a brash bully who likes to break eggs and ruffle feathers. And the policies that reflect his bull-in-a-china-shop approach to foreign relations have come to a head at the right moment to make Davos the hottest ticket in town – for better or worse.