Davos 2026: A Last-Chance Saloon for the Old World Order?
The World Economic Forum's annual gathering in Davos, Switzerland, has long been a beacon for global leaders, business tycoons, and influential thinkers. But this year, as the world grapples with escalating geopolitical tensions and a fraying global order, the event takes on a new significance. Will Davos 2026 be the last chance to salvage the old world order, or will it be a final farewell to a bygone era?
The theme of this year's forum, "A Spirit of Dialogue," seems like a far-fetched hope, given the turbulent times we're living in. Donald Trump, the star guest, has spent the past year disrupting the world order, and his presence at Davos is bound to be a contentious affair.
The US president will be accompanied by a formidable delegation, including the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, the treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, the commerce secretary, Howard Lutnick, and the special envoy Steve Witkoff. Trump's appearance at Davos last year, just days after his second inauguration, set the tone for a chaotic 12 months, with threats of tariffs, demands for increased defense spending, and calls for the Federal Reserve to slash interest rates.
A year on, the rules-based global order, already jeopardized by Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the rising power of China, is rapidly unravelling. The "spirit of dialogue" has been hard to find, and the world is grappling with the consequences of a fragmented and volatile international system.
This year's meeting takes place against a backdrop of extraordinary geopolitical tumult. The war in Ukraine continues, with President Volodymyr Zelenskyy making the trip to Davos to rally support. Just days before heading to the forum, Trump suggested that Ukraine was more reluctant to see peace than Russia, a statement that sparked controversy and raised questions about the forum's ability to foster dialogue and cooperation.
When the World Economic Forum asked over 1,300 politicians, business leaders, and academics about their fears for the future, they identified "geoeconomic confrontation" as the most pressing risk for the next two years. The clash for economic dominance between the big powers is a stark reality, and the second most popular choice was outright war between nations.
In recent weeks, Trump has sent troops to seize the president of Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro, stepped up his rhetoric on annexing Greenland, and threatened to attack Iran if protests continue to be repressed. Yet, amidst the turmoil, there is a fightback underway. Central bankers, usually reticent, have waded into the row over the independence of the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome Powell, by publishing an unprecedented joint letter.
Other leaders, including NATO chief Mark Rutte, the French president, and the European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen, will be flying in to Davos intent on making the argument for free trade, transatlantic cooperation, and the staunch defense of Ukraine in the face of Russian aggression.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, will also be in attendance. As he reviewed his priorities for 2026, he said that "when leaders run roughshod over international law – when they pick and choose which rules to follow – they are not only undermining global order, they are setting a perilous precedent."
The erosion of international law is not happening in the shadows, Guterres added. Global military spending now amounts to $2.7 trillion, an annual increase of 9.4%, the steepest rise since the end of the Cold War. Countries around the world are racing to increase war spending, either in response to perceived threats from Russia, China, and the US, or due to the events of 2026 alone.
But for all the projection of US military power into countries such as Venezuela, senior diplomats also quietly believe it could prompt a growing resistance among populations around the world. While American power is significant, China and other developing countries continue to grow as a share of the global economy, meaning the long-term balance is slowly tipping away from the US.
So far, Trump's efforts to force a pro-Russian peace on Ukraine have failed amid a concerted European pushback. The US president pulled back from an attack on Iran, partly after intense lobbying from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries concerned about the risk of a regional war, but also because it was not obvious there was a credible external military response to the Iranian regime's crackdown.
Multinational cooperation continues, but it gains fewer headlines. This year, the UN will launch an independent scientific panel on artificial intelligence: a 40-strong expert group to try to temper the commercially driven AI models dominated by US companies.
More than 50 years after its founding, the pulling power of the World Economic Forum for the rich and powerful remains undimmed. Over 60 heads of state or government, 55 economy and finance ministers, and over 800 chief executives or chairs of big corporations are expected to attend.
Companies pay 27,000 Swiss francs for each member of their delegation, in addition to a chunky annual membership fee. In a gesture at inclusivity, the WEF uses some of that income to subsidize participants from civil society groups.
Participants will join public discussions and debates, hold thousands of private meetings across the sprawling conference site, and swap gossip at champagne-fuelled late-night parties in the resort's hotels and après-ski spots, many taken over by private sector sponsors for the duration.
Corporate movers and shakers due to attend include Nvidia's president, Jensen Huang, Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, and the Anthropic founder and CEO, Dario Amodei – all key figures in the AI boom that has buoyed Wall Street and further enriched a cohort of US billionaires over the past 12 months.
However, the climate impact of the annual shindig is also a concern. Analysis commissioned by environmental charity Greenpeace before the meeting found that the number of private jet flights associated with Davos more than tripled between the 2023 and 2025 meetings.
The WEF president, Børge Brende, a former Norwegian minister, told Time magazine in a pre-Davos interview, "we know that President Trump [and his] secretaries are very much into deal making, and to make deals, you have to have a dialogue." But he conceded that the meeting was taking place against "the most complicated geopolitical backdrop since the WEF was founded."
Winnie Byanyima, the executive director of UNAIDS, who co-chaired Davos in 2015, using the platform to press for action on global inequality, says Trump's presence is hard to reconcile with the WEF's stated purpose.
"It’s such a contradiction, in my view. A world where the WEF would contribute is a rules-based world, where there’s predictability, where business works with governments – business to achieve their profits but governments to meet the needs of their people. But him, he represents might is right."
This year's gathering is the first of a new era, without the looming presence of "Mr Davos" – the WEF's founder, Klaus Schwab. The 87-year-old, who hosted the first Davos summit in 1971, stepped down from the organization's board last year, after whistleblowers raised allegations, including unauthorized spending, against Schwab and his wife, Hilde.
He publicly contested the claims, insisting, "throughout this journey, Hilde and I never used the forum for personal enrichment."
After an investigation by the Swiss law firm Homburger, the WEF's board of trustees cleared him of "material wrongdoing" last August. "Minor irregularities, stemming from blurred lines between personal contributions and forum operations, reflect deep commitment rather than intent of misconduct," a WEF statement said at the time.
Schwab is not expected to be present at this year's gathering; but in a hint that he may be missing the limelight, he is publishing a new book – one of a series – to coincide with Davos. Titled "Restoring Truth and Trust," the 110-page volume is peppered with phrases such as "having devoted my life to public service" and "for someone who spent years in diplomatic circles."
Danny Sriskandarajah, the director of the New Economics Foundation thinktank in the UK, was once one of the WEF's Young Global Leaders, who bring the perspectives of civil society and business into Davos discussions.
He is not attending this year, and argues that the WEF no longer serves the purpose for which Schwab founded it more than half a century ago. "My view is, it was ahead of its time, but now it’s a relic of the past," he says.
"He [Schwab] was ahead of the game, in that he said, ‘we’re only going to tackle the world’s problems if we do a multi-stakeholder approach and we think about the global dimensions of these problems.’ But with any semblance of a ‘rules-based global order’ now gone, it’s problematic for lots of reasons, mostly because it is just unaccountable and there’s no real legitimacy to it."
Jamie Drummond, another Young Global Leader, who co-founded the One charity with the U2 lead singer Bono, says that in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before the global financial crisis, discussions in Davos helped to shape the diplomatic year ahead.
In 2000, it was the venue for the launch of Gavi, the public-private alliance that has since vaccinated more than 1 billion children. "I turned up with Bono a few times," he says. "It was useful to get the vaccines initiative going; it was useful to advance debt cancellation in the millennium and the years after that, and I think its peak was when we helped launch Make Poverty History there in 2005."
He argues that such optimism has long evaporated – but he will still be there this year, not as a formal delegate, but in the hope of influencing some of the world's most powerful people. "This is not Davos’s heyday, it is on the decline – but it’s not dead yet," he says.
