Davos, Switzerland is a relatively small town. Its population is roughly 11,000 people. Once a year, this grows to 30,000 as the World Economic Forum meets. This year, there are 3,000 active participants. About 800 are Americans, so roughly every fourth person is from the states. The remaining 27,000 include security, restaurant workers, news media, and support staff. With the growing violence around the world, this week has a strong contingent from the Swiss military protecting everyone.
There are more than 60 heads of state coming to this World Economic Forum, including President Donald J. Trump. An American President brings a huge contingent of people (The President has 24/7 security, no matter where he or she is). This includes cabinet members, support staff, security, communications, and the White House Press corps.
As U.S. Ambassador to Switzerland and Liechtenstein, Callista is giving four different speeches. (This includes one on apprenticeships, which I am going to share in a shorter newsletter). She is in a lot of meetings. I go to some but not all of them.
A major function of this week is people seeing each other. As someone from Coca-Cola said to me, there’s great efficiency in seeing so many people in one place in one week. Since Coca-Cola is in more than 200 countries, you can imagine how many contacts its team makes in one brief week with people coming from all over the world. People at the forum describe these brief meetings as “touch points.” It is a strange little world.
President Trump’s speech will inevitably be the high point of the week. Callista and I will be there, and I will write later this week about his speech and the various reactions to it.
The World Economic Forum is a remarkable social invention and a tribute to one man, Klaus Schwab. Schwab’s parents moved from Germany to Switzerland when the Nazis rose to power. He graduated from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. He later got a doctorate in economics from the University of Fribourg and a Master’s in Public Administration from the Kennedy School at Harvard, where became close to a young professor named Henry Kissinger.
While teaching at the University of Geneva, he came up with the idea of a European Management Forum which had its first meeting in Davos in 1971. Davos is a major ski resort, so asking leaders to come to a place where they could ski and talk comfortably with minimum distraction was a real winner.
By 1987, Schwab’s forum was successful and drawing people from all over the world. It then changed titles to the World Economic Forum. As early as 1982, President Ronald Reagan was communicating with forum attendees through video links. His attention to Davos in the 1980s increased its prestige and made it a major institution.
For a while, Davos followed the elites’ drift to the left. However, with the emergence of President Trump—and especially his four-year odyssey of returning to the White House—the repudiation of left-wing nuttiness which is occurring in America is beginning to transform the World Economic Forum.
As I have walked to various events with Callista and talked with participants, I have been struck by the total absence of overt anti-Americanism. There is a clear sense that America is back, and we are dynamic and rapidly evolving. People want to understand and work with us rather than fight.
I was a graduate student in Brussels during the Vietnam War, and I know what it is like to have to deal with European anger and hostility toward America. I thought that with Greenland, tariffs, and other issues, there would have been a much bigger negative reaction than I am seeing.
We will see how President Trump’s speech goes – and how the world responds to it.
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