Davos is back with a bang. After returning to in-person meetings with a belated, pared-down version last May, this week the World Economic Forum’s annual conference has been packed with attendees trying to learn more about the world in 2023. It’s not a bad place to try. The conference was a truly global event; I was able to meet with Chinese officials, American CEOs, Ukrainian human rights activists and Middle Eastern entrepreneurs.
Every year, some country or trend is surrounded by buzz. This year, there were three such topics — the Gulf States, India and artificial intelligence. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, flush with oil wealth, were showcasing their formidable ambitions. From India, which might be the most optimistic country in the world right now, came representatives of many of its states, competing with one another for attention and investment. And AI was the futuristic topic that almost no one really appeared to understand but everyone was discussing.
Outside these pockets of energy, though, there was certainly a lot of gloom and doom. The big geopolitical topic was, of course, Ukraine, where most see a long, hard, costly slog. On the economy, storied companies such as Microsoft and Goldman Sachs have announced layoffs and others, write-downs. In the West, people worry about inflation. In many developing countries, they are bracing for debt crises and defaults.
The challenges facing the world are real, but I came out of Davos thinking the big story is actually much more positive. Despite a series of severe shocks — covid-19, the Russia-Ukraine war, global energy and food crises, inflation — the West and its partners, from Kenya to Singapore, are stepping up, cooperating and forging a new way forward.
The United States is in remarkably good shape. The Federal Reserve appears to be on the right track in tackling inflation. President Biden has signed some of the largest, long-term investments in the U.S. economy since the era of Lyndon B. Johnson half a century ago. U.S. technology firms continue to break ground in every field from AI to new RNA drugs.
On Europe, in contrast, most people at Davos were pessimistic. But even here, what I find to be striking is that facing enormous challenges — the first full-blown geopolitical crisis on its doorstep in decades, a disastrous energy crisis — the European nations came together and stayed together.
As Matthias Matthijs points out in an excellent essay in Foreign Affairs, Europe can boast of several achievements. Despite the costs of war, high energy prices and the burden of Ukrainian refugees, Europe has remained strongly united on Ukraine. It is weaning itself off Russian energy much faster than anyone predicted. The European Central Bank, like the Federal Reserve, is managing inflation reasonably well. Populists in Europe, such as Viktor Orban and Giorgia Meloni, have not been able to seize the agenda. If anything, they have had to trim their sails. The one European country that is floundering is Britain, but in a way that actually highlights the costs of Brexit and the virtues of European unity and cooperation.
Meanwhile, the greatest rogue state in the world, Russia, is largely isolated, struggling to sell its natural gas (roughly three-quarters of which used to go to Europe) and cut off from the modern technology it needs to modernize its economy and war machine. Even China has signaled a greater distance between itself and Russia in recent weeks.
There are lots of problems out there, from Ukraine’s future to inflation to climate change. But the big story is the unity and resolve of the democratic world. That unity is much stronger than at any point during the Cold War, when major schisms between Europe and the United States were commonplace.
We have wondered for a while what would happen across the globe as the United States’ role as sole superpower ebbed and it lost the capacity or will to be the world’s policeman. Many predicted that we would see a return to anarchy or the law of the jungle, in which authoritarian states would ensure that might makes right. But there are encouraging signs that what we are actually witnessing is a new kind of order built on the unity and cooperation of the world’s free nations. To be sure, coalitions of the free are always messy and contentious: Their unity will have to stand, their cooperation will have to grow. But it is possible that we will look back at these years and see that the age of American leadership was slowly replaced by one of democratic leadership.
