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Trump fear and loathing in Davos

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The ‘globalists’ gathered in the Swiss Alps don’t know whether to cry, panic or laugh about the incoming American president.

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At a closed-door session at the World Economic Forum, one of the panelists asked the self-styled global elite in the audience a question: How many of you think Donald Trump won’t even finish one term in the White House?

About half the hands shot up. “There’s a lot of wishful thinking about Trump here,” deadpanned Moisés Naím, the former editor of Foreign Policy magazine, who posed the question.

Neither Trump — nor, aside from a brief appearance by Anthony Scaramucci, any of his advisers — is mixing it up with the liberal cosmopolitan crowd at Davos this year. But, even with an agenda packed with Brexit and Syria and migration crises and big elections coming in Europe this year, the new American president is sucking up most of the thin Alpine air.

Perhaps with the exception of parts of Brooklyn and the San Francisco Bay Area, it would be hard to find any place as deeply anxious about the inauguration on Friday of President Trump. Before and, more worryingly for them, after his election win, Trump has gone out of his way to openly question seemingly everything the Davos crowd holds dear: Free trade and globalization, a Western alliance of democracies, American-funded security for Europe.

Au revoir, West as they know it

Trump spoiled the Davos party before it started. Speaking to German and British dailies a day before the Forum kicked off, he repeatedly criticized Angela Merkel and said he trusted the Germany leader no more than Russia’s strongman Vladimir Putin, declared the NATO military alliance “obsolete” and rooted for the further unravelling of the European Union in the wake of Britain’s vote to leave the bloc.

The comments dominated the rest of the week, leaving the “globalists” (to borrow the phrase used, derisively, by Trump’s chief strategist Steve Bannon) mostly appalled and confused. “No one knows whether to take him seriously,” Emma Marcegaglia, head of lobbying group Business Europe and chairman of Italy’s oil giant Eni, told a panel co-hosted by POLITICO. If Trump does what he says or tweets, she added, “then it’s a disaster.”

Trump spoiled the Davos party before it started by criticizing Angela Merkel | Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images

“The whole world is in a waiting mood,” the EU’s trade commissioner, Cecilia Malmström, said in an interview Thursday.

The Europeans pushed back in public to defend the EU and NATO in unusually emotional terms. “Brexit is a wake-up call,” said European Commissioner and former French Finance Minister Pierre Moscovici. And to many here, so is Trump.

“We need to be very clear where we need Europe at the moment … A promise of Europe was ‘nie wieder Krieg,’ ‘no more war,’ and that’s still relevant,” said Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte, who didn’t have to cite the American president by name — there was no mystery who he had in mind. 

The German defence minster, Ursula von der Leyen, bristled at the description of NATO as “obsolete.”

“We fight for something,” she said at a panel. “We [at NATO] fight for democracy, for open societies, for the rule of law, for human rights,” adding that those values unite Europe and the U.S.

Trump’s policies are still “blurry,” von der Leyen told Germany’s ZDF in an interview Thursday. In her talks with Republican senators and congressmen in Davos, the visiting Americans gave assurances “that the transatlantic relationship will hold,” but asked for some time for the dust to settle, she added.

Trump nowhere and everywhere

Even when Trump isn’t the topic of discussion, many at the Forum couldn’t keep him out of the conversation. Austrian Chancellor Christian Kern found himself labelled a “slim-fit Trump” by Swiss TV host Susanne Wille as she groped for ways to explain his hardline approach to migration to a global audience.

Trump’s style as much as his substance grates. Some of the 3,000-odd Davos men and, though still a minority, women are unused to a billionaire being uninterested in them. The people who come here are used to assuming the world revolves around them.

ATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg, leader of the alliance Trump snubbed as “obsolete” Monday, was at pains to be in agreement with Trump when speaking to POLITICO Thursday. “I agree with him that European allies have to invest more in collective defense,” Stoltenberg said. “I am looking forward to work with President Trump on how to adapt NATO.”

Elsewhere there was a lot of impromptu therapy in between invocations of the apocalypse. Few of the leading political and business leaders would go as far on the record as Johan Dennelind, CEO of Scandinavian telecoms company Telia.

Dennelind said that while it’s natural for “business to plan for the worst-case scenario” regarding any change to its operating environment, what worries many is the worst case scenario for the unfolding Trump presidency is on a different scale to other changes of government globally.

For some, nervous laughter was the best remedy. Cartoonist Patrick Chappatte had the crowd at a “Strengthening Democracy” forum in stitches as he displayed six-meter tall versions of his Trump sketches on screens: They showed the Statue of Liberty being groped and fake Trump tweets mimicking the incoming president’s style.

The one place in Davos where the crowd seemed upbeat about Trump was an evening reception Tuesday at Russia House, a venue for Russian business delegations at the Forum.

One of the bars in the town tried to entice people in with a play on Trump’s campaign slogan written out in chalk on a board outside: “Make your world great again,” starting at 2 p.m. every day.

Some of the Americans in town tried to reassure the others. A U.S. ambassador appointed by Barack Obama said the Davos crowd hoped Trump would “just be a responsible adult” after he takes the oath Friday. Frederick Kempe, the president of the Washington-based Atlantic Council, said the anxiety about Trump’s foreign policy was overdone, noting he’s appointed strong figures to his cabinet.

The man in the Stetson

As hard as it is to find Trump advisers or supporters here, one stood out at a party in a ski chalet hosted by Bill Gates on Wednesday night. Wearing a Stetson, Augie Fabela II, the co-founder of telecoms company Vimpelcom and a Trump fan, said he’s tried to make the case for his man here, but admitted he mostly gets blank stares or pushback. His pitch to them: “Who doesn’t want to support a great American?”

The one place in Davos where the crowd seemed upbeat about Trump was an evening reception Tuesday at Russia House, a venue for Russian business delegations at the Forum.

The ghost of Trump also spurred a couple of unlikely politicians to use the platform to audition for the role of leader of the free — or better yet the Davos — world.

Many of the same Forum participants who bemoaned the political turn in America sat enraptured by Chinese President Xi Jinping — who runs a one-party, authoritarian state — as he delivered an ode to globalization Tuesday, laced with subtle criticisms of Trump’s world outlook.

British Prime Minister Theresa May, who got an initially frosty reception here as the leader of the country that’s tearing Europe apart, did an unexpected pivot in her turn on the Davos main stage. In her speech on Thursday morning, she made the case that the one country that’s ready to defend free trade, reform global capitalism and deal with “ordinary peoples’” concerns was the United Kingdom. In contrast — it was left unsaid but clearly understood — to the new United States.

Matthew Kaminski contributed reporting.

http://www.politico.eu/article/trump-fear-and-loathing-in-davos/

 

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