How Davos redeemed itself
Add Axios as your preferred source to
see more of our stories on Google.
Photo illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios. Photo: Fabrice Coffrini/ AFPvia Getty Images
DAVOS, Switzerland — In an age of populism and growing insularity, the World Economic Forum defied the odds this year by reclaiming its lost currency: relevance.
Why it matters: Thanks to a transformative technology and a hurricane of American power, Davos truly was the locus of global events.
- In past years, the public side of the forum felt weightless. Speeches blurred together. Panel chatter evaporated into Alpine air. Big corporations generated little news of consequence, and world leaders even less.
- Not this week. The AI frenzy was palpable at WEF, reflecting a shared belief among CEOs, investors and governments that a society-wide transformation is underway.
Zoom in: Social justice and climate themes faded from the agenda, replaced by a new moral framing — "center humanity" as AI adoption accelerates.
- But the animating question was more bluntly commercial: How and when will unprecedented AI investment begin to show commensurate returns?
Zoom out: Only one force was powerful enough to pull Davos' attention away from the future and back to the present: President Trump and the fracturing global order.
- Trump's Greenland threats hijacked the forum from the start, with nervous jokes and oblique references to global "instability" becoming the default icebreaker at panels and parties.
- Then a parade of Western leaders, led by Canada's Mark Carney, took the main stage and dispensed with euphemism: The world had forever changed, and nostalgia was no strategy.
Davos became an emergency summit. Markets plunged as trade warfare and transatlantic rupture appeared inevitable. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent urged leaders to "take a deep breath" and wait for Trump's arrival.
- The advice proved sound: Trump insulted his way through a 70-minute speech inside a jam-packed Congress Hall but moved toward de-escalation by ruling out the use of military force to seize Greenland.
- Hours later, after meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Trump completed his extraordinary climbdown — lifting the tariff threat in exchange for a "framework for a future deal" in Greenland.
The Greenland saga hogged global headlines and turned WEF 2026 into an inflection point — accelerating Europe's entry into the dangerous new world of great power rivalry.
- Even the most jaded veterans seemed buoyed by the buzz on the Promenade and in the Congress Center.
The bottom line: BlackRock CEO Larry Fink — who as WEF's new interim co-chair served as the "mayor of Davos" — opened the conference by hailing a record turnout of world leaders and CEOs, and questioning whether anyone outside the room would care.
- The answer turned out to be a resounding yes.
