Editor's note: Radhika Desai, a special commentator for CGTN, is a professor of political studies at the University of Manitoba in Canada. The article reflects the author's opinions and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

The 2026 annual gathering of the Western establishment, the World Economic Forum (WEF) at Davos, is expected to be the biggest ever in terms of numbers and influence. The forum, which has been designing the architecture of the liberal-imperialist project since 1971, will this year have about 3,000 delegates, a record 65 government leaders.

Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock and interim co-chair of the WEF, pulled out all the stops to make this year's gathering the best-attended ever, in terms of the number and influence of its delegates. However, the dark clouds that had already begun to gather over the forum some years ago, as Western economies first began to feel the ground beneath their imperialist feet shift, just got darker.

The biggest and darkest of these clouds is, by all accounts, the Trump administration. Last year, the newly inaugurated U.S. President Donald Trump addressed the gathering virtually. He delivered his usual mix of seductive talk about growth – of jobs, investment, the artificial intelligence sector, stocks and other asset markets – and threats – of tariffs, of crashing oil prices (he urged OPEC to cut oil costs) and of making Canada the 51st state.

This year, Fink has ensured his presence in the flesh. We don't know whether he had any inkling that Trump was going to kick off the new year with even more violent ructions than he had unleashed the year before. Contrary to the claim of "kidnapping President Maduro," there is no credible evidence of such an act; Trump's previous actions included threats against Iran, and now his demand for Greenland.

The WEF has nodded to these realities. It has published the 2026 Global Risks Report, which identifies "geoeconomic confrontation" (not just "geopolitical risks") as the most severe threat, in particular the erosion of multilateralism due to the proliferation of international conflict.

Other key risks include economic instability from potential consumer inflation and inflated asset-price bubbles, risks from unregulated technology, social disintegration arising from rising inequality, and ecological threats from the long-unaddressed trio of pollution, biodiversity loss and climate warming (though climate concerns have declined in short-term urgency compared to geopolitical risks).

It has also made "the Spirit of Dialogue" its theme and placed the question of how the world can cooperate in a contested environment at the top of its list of key questions, followed by exploring new sources of growth, creating a better workforce, deploying innovation and balancing prosperity with planetary limits.

So, will dialogue and cooperation guide Davos, and the world, out of the raucous and increasingly violent contestation on the international plane and toward calmer and more secure waters? While jaw-jaw is always better than war-war, as former UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill famously put it, whether Davos can counteract Trump, let alone the larger dysfunctions that led to his political elevation to U.S. president, is an open question. This raises an even more fundamental one: Can the liberal-imperialist Davos leopard change its spots?

Trump's inauguration of the new year with even more outlandish threats and actions – the latest of which is his ultimatum to Europe: Hand over Greenland or face 25 percent tariffs by June (starting with 10 percent tariffs from February 1) is clearly calculated to bring European leaders supplicating to him at Davos.

This has forced Western liberal imperialists, who have hitherto so blithely identified threats to the international order with an allegedly "territorially aggressive Russia" or an "over-producing China," to admit that they actually emanate from the West itself.

Antonio Guterres, the UN secretary-general, was clearly referring to Trump when 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" and that "The erosion of international law is not happening in the shadows." Guterres previously warned that powerful forces are undermining global cooperation, echoing concerns about Trump administration's policies.

However, the U.S. president did not come from nowhere. He is a symptom of the malaise that the West has inflicted upon itself by opting for the combination of neoliberalism and liberal internationalism in the 1980s and sticking with it since. The result has been economically debilitating, socially divisive and politically polarizing for the West, and has inflicted heavy costs on much of the rest of the world. Trump would never have been elected president of the leading Western society but for its multifaceted crisis.

Since its beginning, Davos has been charting the neoliberal and liberal-imperialist way. For all these decades, it has been part of the problem. While it is now avowing the intention of becoming part of the solution, and while the historical necessity of its doing so is becoming clearer, will the Western elites that still preside over Davos accept this fact in good grace?

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