“There’s no diplomacy with Donald Trump: he’s a T rex. You mate with him or he devours you.” Debate at the World Economic Forum annual meetings high in the Swiss Alps is usually scrupulously polite, but as this year’s gathering got under way in Davos on Tuesday, California’s Democratic governor, Gavin Newsom, had this blunt advice for handling the week’s star speaker.
The US president was yet to arrive but throughout the blond wood congress centre the hottest topic among the global elite of business and politics – on and off conference stages – was Trump’s intemperate attack on European allies, threatening punitive tariffs if they fail to let him annex Greenland.
Trump’s treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, kicked off the day by urging US allies to calm down, accusing them of “hysteria” in their reaction to the president’s comments. “What I am urging everyone here to do is sit back, take a deep breath and let things play out,” he said.
However, a string of European leaders who addressed delegates on Tuesday seemed very reluctant to wait and see what the T rex is minded to do to them when he arrives to give his Wednesday afternoon speech.
The European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, said recent chaotic events underlined the need for what she called “a new form of European independence” – and she warned that it would be a mistake to expect a return to normal. “Nostalgia will not bring back the old order,” she said.
The French president, Emmanuel Macron, also attempted to galvanise the European response to Trump with a warning about the risks of “new imperialism or new colonialism”.
Wearing mirrored aviation sunglasses throughout because of an eye condition, Macron delivered a speech oozing criticism – and a smattering of sarcasm. “It’s great to be here and it’s a time of peace, stability and predictability,” he said to peals of laughter.
He went on to warn of what he called “a shift toward autocracy against democracy … a shift towards a world without rules where international law is trampled underfoot, where the only law seems to be the strongest and imperial ambitions are resurfacing”.
Unless the US president retreated on his Greenland threat, Macron suggested Europe may have to use its anti-coercion instrument, known as the “trade bazooka”, potentially imposing sweeping sanctions and tariffs. “Can you imagine? This is crazy,” he said.
Before addressing the packed congress hall, Macron made a show of shaking hands with European leaders, including von der Leyen, lined up in the front row.
“Let’s not accept the global order which will be decided by those who claim to have the bigger voice or the biggest teeth,” he said.
Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, who turned his party’s electoral fortunes around partly by taking an “elbows up” stance against the US president, also used a keynote speech to sound the death knell for the rules-based global order.
Peppering his address with references from sources as varied as Thucydides and the former Czech leader Václav Havel, Carney warned: “There is a strong tendency for countries to go along to get along. To accommodate. To avoid trouble. To hope that compliance will buy safety – it won’t.” Echoing Newsom’s warning, he added: “If you are not at the table, you are on the menu.”
Just as Carney was speaking, another member of the large US delegation, Trump’s commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, was giving a combative account of the US position at a panel discussion in another Davos conference room.
“We are here to make a very clear point: globalisation has failed the west and the United States of America. It’s a failed policy. It is what the WEF has stood for, which is export, offshore, find the cheapest labour in the world, and the world is a better place for it,” he said. “The fact is, it has left America behind. It has left American workers behind.”
Instead, Lutnick suggested, the US would look out for its own interests – and he urged other nations to do the same. Predicting that the Greenland “kerfuffle,” as he called it, would eventually be resolved through dialogue rather than trade war, he insisted: “When America shines, the world shines.”
Some analysts suggested that Trump would seek to woo his audience when he addresses Davos on Wednesday, rather than create fresh drama. But with both sides of an increasingly raw global divide on clear display, the stage is set for the T rex to make quite an entrance.
