It was clear from the cheering and the Q&A that followed Zelenskyy’s speech at Davos that it is less economic growth than regime change in the Russian Federation that is the priority of the WEF.
The manner in which the US Surrender Document to the Taliban was signed at Doha in 2020, followed by what seemed to be a panicky withdrawal of all US forces and their capabilities in Afghanistan, emboldened foes of the US and its friends and allies to multiply their covert and open hostile actions. Donald Trump claims that he would not have scuttled away from that ravaged country in the manner his successor did, leaving behind an immense cache of weapons and equipment, not to mention facilities such as the Bagram Air Base. However, the Instrument of Surrender Trump’s team signed in Doha does not make clear how exactly a Trump withdrawal would have differed from the Biden withdrawal.
The US retains the Guantanamo Base in Cuba to this day, and could have acted similarly in Bagram, except that President Biden was insistent that not a single US military personnel remain behind in the country that was being abandoned by him to the Taliban. Whether it be the Russian military’s explicit entry into Ukraine on 24 February 2022, or the manner in which Hamas carried out a terror attack on Israel on 7 October 2023, or in the way the Houthis have been emboldened to begin an attack on US ships in a crucial trade waterway, the taint of fear and spinelessness that accompanied the manner of the 2021 withdrawal of US forces in Afghanistan has undoubtedly played a key role in the sanctioning by local leaderships of such attacks on US interests and friends. In the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos, US National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan was reticent about the rising threat posed by the People’s Republic of China, but was eloquent about the Houthis, a ragtag force far less formidable than the Taliban. Given the presence of a large number of invitees from the PRC to the 2024 World Economic Summit, Sullivan was seeking to follow the example of Secretary of State Antony Blinken in deferring to the tender sensibilities of Xi Jinping. Once the latter is convinced that the US (and consequently NATO) does not have the appetite to enter into a conflict with China, a view that has been spreading at speed across the world, he may for domestic political reasons decide to first choke Taiwan through a blockade and subsequently invade and occupy the island country by force. Would the Biden administration (or indeed a Republican administration, given the isolationist stance of many in that party) have the spine to meet a blockade of Taiwan with a blockade of PRC shipping through the waters of the Indo-Pacific flowing from Europe to Asia? Efforts at such a blockade are indeed taking place, but of vessels belonging not to China but to the US and its allies. Meanwhile, the South China Sea has turned into a PRC lake, with only the Philippines standing up to an illegal conquest of what is clearly an international waterway over which ASEAN has substantial rights.
Summits at Davos are useful in signalling will and intent, or the lack of both, and Klaus Schwab has made no secret of the fact that he believes that the more the PRC is assisted by the West to grow, the more aligned Beijing will become to western interests. WEF meets at Davos are part of the Cold War 1.0 rituals that crowd both sides of the Atlantic. Xi promised Putin of an “iron alliance” days before the latter sent his troops into Russian-speaking areas of Ukraine that seceded from the country in 2014. Did the Chinese delegation walk out the conference venue at Davos while Volodymyr Zelenskyy was demonising Xi’s “Iron Ally” Putin, and was demanding that NATO launch an immediate war with the Russian Federation? They remained fixed in their seats, not even going to the restroom during the Zelenskyy rant. Western delegates in several conferences walked out when the Russian side was speaking, but thus far, a similar show of disapproval by PRC delegates representing Putin’s “Iron Ally” Xi has been lacking anywhere, even when verbal attacks against Putin and the Russian Federation have been at their most vituperative.
During the period when Stalin was in power, Mao feigned respect for him and fealty for the USSR. Soon after Nikita Khrushchev took over, Mao showed his true feelings for the USSR. Rather than stand with Russia, the PRC looks towards continuing to bask in a world where those such as Klaus Schwab hold sway over western policy. What Zelenskyy demanded at Davos was that NATO immediately directly join Ukraine in its war against Russia, a policy that he has championed from the start of the war, and has worked hard since then to somehow provoke.
It was clear from the cheering and the Q&A that followed Zelenskyy’s speech at Davos that it is less economic growth than regime change in the Russian Federation that is the priority of the WEF. Would Schwab have invited President Bongbong Marcos of the Philippines to speak about the pressure he is facing from the PRC, or President Tsai of Taiwan about the almost daily diet of military intimidation from the PRC that is being faced by her country simply because Taiwan wants to remain democratic? Given that he and the organisation he runs is still lost in the Cold War 1.0 era, such gestures by him would be an impossibility.
What is acceptable to the WEF is an open call by an invited Head of State for NATO to launch what would be a full scale war against the most formidable nuclear weapons power in the world, that too a country that western policy has pushed into the embrace of the PRC, the superpower that needs to be faced up to in Cold War 2.0, the memo about which seems not to have reached the gathering at Davos.