The World Economic Forum held annually at Davos has always been a marvel of collective self-esteem: thousands of powerful people flying in on private jets to solemnly discuss the world’s problems—most of which are sitting in the room.
I went there once. ABC News sent me in January 2018 to cover President Donald Trump’s first trip to Davos. I remember two things: How beautiful that place is, and how the attendees even then sensed that Trump’s arrival sounded the death knell to their hopes for a better, more cooperative world, a vision that somehow still clung to the conference, despite the billionaires, the jets, the feverish networking.
Davos sits high in the Alps. Wood and stone chalets tucked into pine forests, peaks rising sheer and serene. On a sunny, day, those mountains reach into an impossible electric blue sky and nearly blind you; the human drama below them seems puny and temporary. It makes one think—or should.
Donald Trump went to Davos this year and did what he usually does: he ranted. Trump always mistakes volume for power, domination for leadership, and grievance for strategy. We are all used to it. But this time, it seems different.
The speech Trump that delivered in Davos was not simply a rambling, campaign-style entertainment, or even a laundry list of his many boiling resentments. It was something far more consequential than that. It was a declaration—explicit, unembarrassed, and revealing—of a worldview that marks the end of an era for American power.
Henry Kissinger—a keen-eyed, aphoristic student of history and power—once said that “Trump may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretenses.” He was 95 years old when he said that, and he was right. Trump fits Kissinger’s description perfectly.
What Kissinger did not say—because it is not always true—is that such figures are often builders, sensing in their historical moment new opportunities for power and stability, success and coherence. They replace what they destroy with something new.
Napoleon ended dynasties—and built the modern centralized state. Franklin Roosevelt rejected generations of laissez-faire economics in America, and wrote a new social contract for our country: the New Deal. Deng Xiaoping ended Maoism in China, and invented state-led capitalism with harsh political control.
Donald Trump is an ending without a beginning.
Trump’s Davos address stripped away any remaining ambiguity about how he sees the world. In his unfurnished mind and nihilistic morality, there are only two kinds of countries, two kinds of people: those getting screwed, and those doing the screwing. Power is always zero-sum. Cooperation is either weakness or a ruse. Trust is for fools.
There is no sense, in Trump’s speech, that American power has ever rested on anything other than force and leverage. No recognition that for decades nations chose to align with the United States not because they were coerced to do so, but because they trusted us. They believed that we were broadly stable, broadly decent, and broadly predictable. There have been plenty of exceptions, certainly—but as a general rule, it was true. Trump treats that entire architecture of trust as a con. Something for suckers.
And so, syllable by syllable, he squanders the very thing he claims to be restoring: American greatness.
What Trump does not seem to understand—or does not care about—is that power based purely on fear is brittle. That’s because nations will hedge against another country that cannot be trusted at all. Markets will discount the instability of amorality in leadership. And our allies will quietly, gradually de-couple from us and move on.
When I covered Trump in Davos in 2018, the general attitude toward him at the conference was wary and scornful. He was like a big, strange dog in the house—a problem, smelly, but manageable. This time, Trump’s speech, and the record of the first year of his second term, have convinced every Davos Man and Davos Woman that history is not going to wait while everyone exchanges business cards. Davos has always been performative. But Trump is not pretending. And they know it.
The United States under Donald Trump is no longer a reliable steward of the international system it once led. An era is ending—because the country that underwrote it no longer believes in it.
Which brings us to Mark Carney.
The Prime Minister of Canada stood on the same Davos stage this week and articulated the clearest counterargument to Trump offered by any democratic leader so far. Carney rejected the soupy, sappy nostalgia for the old “rules-based international order,” and he refused to pretend it still functions as advertised, or can ever be restored. That, he said, was a lie, and he urged other, middle-sized powers to stop performing it.
Carney’s argument is simple: a world of pure Trumpian amoral transactionalism will be poorer, more fragile, and more dangerous. In the face of that danger, Carney made the obvious point—grounded in history—that when great powers abandon even the pretense of rules, other nations do not rush to submit. Trump thinks that, and he’s a fool to do so. Nations adapt—they always adapt—by diversifying, forging new alignments, finding new spheres for cooperation, and building resilience together. They push back against the hegemon’s coercion.
Where Trump sees only domination or submission, Carney sees a third path: shared strength. It is not naïve. It is not sentimental. It is realism with a moral spine.
In 1945, standing amid the ruins of Europe, Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson warned that the ultimate danger to us all was not simply brute force, but the abandonment of reason itself. At Nuremberg, he said, the trials of Nazi war criminals were “the most significant tribute that Power has ever paid to Reason.”
Trump is instinct, not reason. He is grievance, not judgment. He is appetite without restraint.
He may indeed be the man who ends an era. But he will not build what comes next. Others—quietly, urgently, and without waiting for America—already are.
—Terry