Even when power bent rules, it bowed theatrically to them. Sure, the slow progress could be frustrating and going through the motions sometime felt performative, but it mattered. The theatre of cooperation and consensus-building reassured smaller states and kept rivals talking before matters got too heated up.
The mood entering Davos 2026 feels very different. Washington has embraced what might be called geopolitics by subtraction.
A presidential memorandum last week directed withdrawal from 66 international bodies, including many UN-linked agencies, instructing departments to cease participation and funding. When the system’s largest shareholder treats institutions as subscriptions to be cancelled, the norm erodes for everyone.
The US operation in Venezuela and capture of President Nicolas Maduro mark a shift from argument-first diplomacy to enforcement-first statecraft. The choreography of international law now trails the action rather than framing it. The message is blunt: power needn’t wait for permission.
For Davos veterans, this feels like the inversion of everything the mountain town once symbolised. Davos was where rivals came to test boundaries safely. The danger is not merely American unilateralism; it’s imitation. Once precedent is set, others cite it. China doesn’t need Venezuela to calculate Taiwan, nor Russia to imagine Kyiv-but both gain rhetorical cover. What follows is not chaos but fragmentation. Diplomacy becomes episodic, convened only after disruption.
Trade turns brittle as sanctions and seizures spill into insurance, logistics and compliance. Middle powers hedge by building parallel routes and alliances, unsure which rules still hold. The global order doesn’t collapse outright; it thins dangerously.Sharper Stakes
And that is why Davos still matters. Not because it produces treaties-it doesn’t-but because it offers proximity. In these corridors, leaders talk without microphones, rivals share coffee instead of communiques. History is littered with such quiet Davos moments: Greek and Turkish officials easing tensions in 1998; Mandela in 1992 persuading a wary business elite that South Africa’s transition would be stable. Davos works not through declarations but through calibration.
Trump’s presence this year, alongside dozens of heads of state, gives the gathering unusual weight. If the prevailing global instinct is “act first, justify later,” Davos 2026 could restore a vanishing discipline: speak early, sketch red lines, prevent miscalculation. Even narrow understandings-NATO alignment on Ukraine, guardrails in the US-China relationship, discreet channels with Moscow-would not solve conflicts. But they could slow them.
For those of us who’ve watched Davos evolve from earnest optimism to wary realism, the stakes feel sharper than ever.
The forum can’t save the world. But it may yet remind powerful nations that the global town-squares they are keen to leave still exists, and that history is kinder to those who choose to take part.
The author is Founder & Managing Partner, Kedaara Capital
