Davos, Switzerland
History was made at this week’s World Economic Forum, but the conventional wisdom about what happened here was as misguided as the Davos consensus usually is.
The conventional story is that America’s grotesque president finally succeeded in wrecking the world order his wiser predecessors had put in place. Eight decades of patient statecraft by a succession of American presidents, ably seconded by their virtuous and farsighted European colleagues, had built a network of institutions and precedents that offered suffering humanity a promise of global peace. Donald Trump has gratuitously reduced it to rubble.