The annual gathering in the Swiss mountains presents itself as a forum for global salvation. In reality, Davos is the cathedral where the architecture of power is maintained and refined, where the realities of domination are sanctified as cooperation.
These are the same people who lecture the world about democracy while they shut down dissent. The same ones who preach free markets while rigging the system in their favor. The same ones who talk about rules when they’re the ones breaking them.
But this year, we did not just witness another iteration of the lavish annual performance. This was the consecration of genocide as acceptable policy. The so-called “rules-based order” that we were told governed our world has never been exposed as the elaborate fiction it is and always was.
For decades, we were fed a narrative about a world governed by laws, not by the whims of the powerful. A world where international cooperation was the default, where multilateral institutions mattered, where “the strong do not prey on the weak.”
But now the facade has crumbled completely. And in its place, we see the raw, unvarnished face of power politics.
Trump didn’t kill the rules-based order. Unlike most others, he just stopped pretending to respect it. He came to Davos not as a participant in some grand global project, but as a conqueror surveying his spoils. To Trump, tariffs are not economic tools, they are weapons. Greenland is not a strategic interest—it is a trophy. It was strangely as bemusing as it was bewildering to watch the entire summit reduced to a transactional marketplace where the only thing that seems to matter is what you can take.
This is what they mean when they talk about “power politics” now dominating the agenda. It’s not just that the topics have shifted from climate change to tariffs. It’s that the very language of international relations has been corrupted beyond recognition.
To say that the Transatlantic Alliance, the sacred cow of Western diplomacy, received a big blow would be an understatement. It was much more brutal, it was put out of its misery. The Europeans finally had to confront what the rest of us have known for generations: the United States has never been a reliable partner in any genuine sense of the word. It has been a hegemon, a bully, and a self-interested actor that cares about the rules only when they served its interests.
Now that the hegemon is openly admitting what it always was, the Europeans, for all their posturing, are left scrambling to find their place in a world where old certainties have dissolved.
But this collapse goes deeper than America’s turn toward nationalism and the rise of populism across the West. What we are witnessing is the complete and utter failure of the liberal international order to deliver on its most basic promise: that cooperation between powerful nations could create a more stable, more equitable world.
For seventy years, this system worked quite well, at least for the countries that designed it and benefited from it. The United States and its European allies built institutions that served their interests while maintaining the fiction of global governance. They preached free trade while practicing protectionism. They talked about human rights while supporting dictators when convenient. They claimed to uphold international law while bombing countries with impunity.
Now that the system no longer serves their needs and the costs of maintaining it outweigh the benefits, they are discarding it without a second thought.
The corporations understand this better than anyone. They have always been the true beneficiaries of this order, and now they are adapting to its collapse. They talk about “political risks” in their supply chains, as if politics were some external force they must contend with. But politics is not external to capitalism—it is capitalism operating in its purest form. The strong extracting from the weak. The powerful dictating terms to the powerless.
