All Eyes On Donald At Davos

What has WEF wrought?

Jan 21, 2026

A rather amusing little problem with this act of protest on the slopes — many of the attendees at Davos have actual monarchs.

SK@sruthijith

As Davos awaits Trump’s arrival, big, visible sign appear on the mountains outside, as seen from the entrance to the Congress centre.

12:43 PM · Jan 21, 2026 · 2.81K Views

2 Reposts · 5 Likes

Axios summarizes Trump’s remarks:

President Trump reiterated his determination to take control of Greenland from Denmark during a combative speech at the World Economic Forum — but seemingly ruled out using force to do so.
Why it matters: European allies have been bracing for a clash with Trump over Greenland this week in the Swiss Alps.
Trump began the Greenland portion of his speech by calling for “immediate negotiations” to acquire the Arctic territory, mocking Denmark for losing it “in six hours” during World War II.
But he also signaled it was time for de-escalation with NATO, dismissing fears that the U.S. military would attack its own allies.
What they’re saying: Trump said that if the U.S. decided to take Greenland by force it would be “unstoppable,” but “I don’t want to use force. I won’t use force. All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland.”
“It’s the United States alone that can protect this giant piece of land, this giant piece of ice, develop it and improve it,” Trump said, declaring that the U.S. was a “great power” and arguing Denmark simply wasn’t.
Between his sharp criticisms of NATO and Europe, Trump repeatedly signaled that fears of invasion were overblown: “They have a choice: You can say yes and we will be very appreciative, or you can say no, and we will remember.”
Breaking it down: With transatlantic relations at a new low, Trump began with a critique rather than an olive branch for his European allies.
“Certain places in Europe are not even recognizable anymore. And we can argue about it but there’s no argument,” Trump said.
He said Europe was “not heading in the right direction” and was plagued by problems “driven by the largest wave of mass migration in human history.”
Trump also claimed the U.S. had saved Europe during World War II. “Without us, right now, you’d all be speaking German and little Japanese.”
The U.S., by contrast, was seeing “the fastest and most dramatic economic turnaround in our country’s history,” Trump claimed.
He added that “inflation has been defeated” — a contention many American consumers would disagree with.
“The USA is the economic engine on the planet, and when it booms the entire world booms,” Trump proclaimed. “You all follow us down, and you follow us up.”

Mark Carney’s remarks:

It seems that every day we’re reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can, and the weak must suffer what they must.
And this aphorism of Thucydides is presented as inevitable, as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.
And faced with this logic, 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.
Well, it won’t.
So, what are our options?
In 1978, the Czech dissident Václav Havel, later president, wrote an essay called The Power of the Powerless, and in it, he asked a simple question: how did the communist system sustain itself?
And his answer began with a greengrocer.
Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window: ‘Workers of the world unite’. He doesn’t believe it, no-one does, but he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persist – not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.
Havel called this “living within a lie”.
The system’s power comes not from its truth, but from everyone’s willingness to perform as if it were true, and its fragility comes from the same source. When even one person stops performing, when the greengrocer removes his sign, the illusion begins to crack. Friends, it is time for companies and countries to take their signs down.
For decades, countries like Canada prospered under what we called the rules-based international order. We joined its institutions, we praised its principles, we benefited from its predictability. And because of that, we could pursue values-based foreign policies under its protection.
We knew the story of the international rules-based order was partially false that the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient, that trade rules were enforced asymmetrically. And we knew that international law applied with varying rigour depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.
This fiction was useful, and American hegemony, in particular, helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.
So, we placed the sign in the window. We participated in the rituals, and we largely avoided calling out the gaps between rhetoric and reality.
This bargain no longer works. Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.
Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration, when integration becomes the source of your subordination.

Joshua Trevino in Engelsberg Ideas:

Implicit in the refusal to entertain the American aspiration is a strategic choice by Danish statecraft, whether or not Danes or their government fully realise it. That choice is to cast their lot entirely with a Europe that remains, for all the busy pretensions of Brussels, an ephemeral power.
Denmark could take a different course. The kingdom is a longtime ally of the United States and its soldiers fought bravely alongside America’s soldiers in Afghanistan. This spirit could inform the reaction to American needs now: instead of a rejection of the American relationship and a refuge in a Europe that could not guarantee the integrity of Danish territory, it could understand the American demand as the opening of a negotiation, or a frank conversation. That certainly is how the businessman US president understands it. Europeans writ large are fond of reproaching the Americans for insufficient cultural comprehension. That critique runs both ways: Europeans, too, ought to understand the American approach.
Interpreting the American aspiration towards Greenland as the opening of a conversation yields something very different from what we see today. The opportunity for Copenhagen is to think creatively about its own interests and relationships, and engage in the fundamentals of statecraft to generate a mutual win among all parties. This could look like many things: a condominium that shares sovereignty over the island, for example, or American sovereign base areas, both leaving the United States and Denmark alike as sovereigns within the island.
The condominium concept is well known in international law and history, and eminently workable given the longstanding positive tenor of Danish-US relations – to which relations will, even now, eventually return. This simple expedient allows both nations to exercise full and joint sovereignty over Greenland. Though it has fallen into general disuse in the post-Second World War era, the idea of the condominium was once a common feature of post-Westphalian statecraft. Joint sovereignty over territory was exercised throughout Europe: in the patchwork of the German states, including in the region that now constitutes the Danish-German border; in what is now Belgium and the Netherlands; in post-Partition Krakow; in Norway’s own Arctic; and to this very day in a small island between France and Spain that is the acknowledged territory of both powers. There are ample non-European examples as well: Samoa was for some time under the joint sovereignty of Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States. Modern Sudan, too, was a formal condominium of Egypt and the UK until 1956 – and Sudan and South Sudan currently maintain a condominium in Abyei.
The condominium, then, is a time-tested and simple expedient for the resolution of competing claims to sovereignty, well grounded in history and statesmanship — and formulated for the adjudication of scenarios like the Danish-American Greenland standoff.
Another workable concept for generating a win-win for both nations and their aspirations to Greenlandic sovereignty might be the model of the sovereign base area. The archetypes for this are the British cantonments of Akrotiri and Dhekelia, carved out of the Cypriot littoral, within which the United Kingdom exercises full sovereignty while leaving independent Cyprus and its population otherwise undisturbed. This solution recalls the old Panama Canal Zone, an area of American sovereignty within the Panamanian republic, but without the political conflicts generated thereby. American sovereign base areas within Greenland could be simultaneously expansive and also inclusive of effectively no Greenlanders, allowing the United States to attend to its own security needs while allowing the citizens of the Danish kingdom the continuance of their prior allegiance. This, too, is a solution allowing for both nations to meet their sovereignty red lines — if they wish for it.
Danish and European statecraft could be further creative in seeking advantageous trade-offs. If press reports are to be believed, the Americans have already been encouraging this with generous offers of payment for the island. Beyond material compensation, Copenhagen might seek an American commitment to Danish interests elsewhere. Those interests proliferate amid Europe’s metastasising uncertainties. What — the Danish state might ask itself — would benefit from major American commitments in trade, security, research, migration, resource exploitation, and more?
This is exactly the kind of conversation the White House is manifestly willing to have. What remains is for Copenhagen to show the same willingness.

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CDR Salamander

Plan Salamander: Operationalized at Wrocław Airport

As you all know, I love nothing more than quoting myself. So, Front Porch members of long standing by now can say things from memory: Plan Salamander for the U.S. posture toward Europe that I have been proposing in one form or another for a couple of decades+. Here is just one example from…

an hour ago · 13 likes · 5 comments · CDR Salamander

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