Cosying up to China amid Donald Trump's new world order is a huge mistake

From their exclusive Alpine pulpit and enlightened by the latest voguish ideas, these movers and shakers issue the sort of decrees for which few people would knowingly vote.

“Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better.” This statement is from a deranged 2016 article for the WEF by the Danish politician Ida Auken but is often wrongly attributed to the festival’s Michael Eavis-type founding father, Klaus Schwab, because, well, it’s the sort of thing he would say.

The German economist, who chaired the WEF since founding it in 1971 until 2025, was conspicuous by his absence this year.

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The globalisation problem

Another notable absentee was avid festivalgoer and WEF enthusiast Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer. Asked in a 2023 interview which he would choose between Davos and Westminster, Starmer answered without hesitation: “Davos”. “Westminster is just a tribal shouting place,” he explained. Parliamentary democracy is such a drag.

The US, in contrast, arrived mob-handed with their biggest delegation yet. President Donald Trump was accompanied by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and several other senior members of his administration.

Trump has been throwing his weight around on the world stage so much lately it is hard to keep up. There has been his dizzying hokey-cokey tariffs habit, the arrest of the gangster masquerading as duly-elected president of Venezuela, and his recent insistence that Greenland come under US ownership to safeguard Western security in the face of emboldened Russia and China.

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Trump and his posse did not come to Switzerland to spitball fantasies of a dystopic near-future in which the hoi polloi are content, in the name of Gaia, to forego privacy, or owning a home, car, or anything else.

Instead, they came with an uncomfortable message for WEFers: globalisation has hollowed out the economies and degraded the militaries of Western democracies.

Most if not all of the 77 million Americans who voted for Trump will have formed the view that the globalist model – sky-high energy prices driven by the net-zero agenda, and the offshoring of manufacturing to a lowest bidder on the other side of the planet – isn’t working for them, their communities or their country. Increasingly, nations across Europe and the West are arriving at similar conclusions.

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American workers left behind

Trump and his supporters, who see it as their mission to “Make America Great Again”, claimed “America First” need not mean “America alone” as they encouraged the likes of the UK, France and Germany to rebuild their industry and militaries and abandon the economic suicide of net zero.

And so, this year, there was little evidence of the old festival spirit at Davos. Instead, the talk was all about a new world disorder, upending what had once seemed unshakeable certainties.

“Globalisation,” Lutnick told a sombre room, “has failed the West and the United States of America... It’s a failed policy. It is what the WEF has stood for, which is export, offshore, far-shore, find the cheapest labour in the world, and the world is a better place for it.

“The fact is, it has left America behind, it has left the American workers behind, and what we are here to say is America First is a different model, one that we encourage other countries to consider, which is that our workers come first, we can have policies that impact our workers, sovereignty is your borders, you’re entitled to have borders.

“Why would Europe agree to be net zero in 2030 when they don’t make a battery?... They are deciding to be subservient to China who make the batteries.”

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There are plenty of other things we no longer make in the UK, including the virgin steel our Armed Forces find so useful.

Meanwhile, Bessent said the US has spent $22 trillion more on defence since 1980 than the rest of Nato. “While the Europeans were building schools, having health care, we have been defending the world,” he said. “And I think the president believes they should be paying their fair share.”

A brutal human rights pariah

Perhaps surprisingly, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney conceded, more in sorrow than in anger, the old order had always been “fiction”. Large powers have always broken the rules when it suited them.

By Carney’s own logic, it’s wrong to say the US broke the old order as it never truly existed. The long-standing failure of the other Nato powers to meet their obligations gave the US reason to stop pretending.

America’s underwriting of Western security since the end of the Second World War has led to the infantilisation of its allies. The Davos crowd has been on an extended holiday from reality for decades.

Carney’s solution – closer ties with the Chinese Communist Party – is also a mistake. Just last April, he described the brutal human rights pariah as “the biggest security threat to Canada”. Millions of Canadians who voted for him may be horrified by his sudden volte face.

In the UK, a new Chinese mega-embassy has been approved in London despite the concerns of MI5 and GCHQ. This week Starmer is on a charm offensive in Beijing, opening the door to closer ties that could include permission for Chinese firm MingYang to build the UK’s largest wind turbine manufacturing facility in the Highlands.

China is not our friend; the CCP does not have our best interests at heart. The US is our friend; Americans want us to be secure and prosperous, for our good and theirs. Trump’s unpleasant manner is by the bye. Starmer should bear this in mind as he glad-hands Xi Jinping and his henchmen. He probably won’t.