Davos Is Cringe

By Noah Rothman

Thursday, January 18, 2024

 

For a certain paranoid sort — a growing contingent, since paranoia has become such a lucrative enterprise — international gatherings of elites are a threat. Exclusive confabs that attract the world’s wealthiest and most powerful are assumed to be where the geopolitical agenda is set, often in opposition to the interests of ordinary people. But the true secret of these conventions isn’t the exquisite competence with which they conspire to subvert the people’s will. The big secret, which is hidden in plain sight, is that these masters of the universe make profound embarrassments of themselves in these surroundings in much the same way and for the same reasons as America’s domestic elites: because they want to be liked by the right people.

 

Take, for example, this display at the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, which was billed as an exercise in cross-cultural competence but has the feel of the performance art native to America’s effete college campuses:

Is this merely the banal multicultural window dressing the global elite deploy as a smokescreen, behind which they execute their grand machinations? Probably not. If it were, we’d have to assume that the world is paying close attention to what WEF participants say. And to listen to them is to be privy to some of the most easily ignored palaver the global economic elite has to offer.

 

“I actually believe that if you open the taps on natural gas everywhere, you won’t be able to close it again,” World Bank president Ajay Banga observed in articulating the challenge posed to international meddlers who want to keep the developing world from using power generated by fossil fuels to grow. That’s not new. Green-energy advocates have been pressuring the developing world to eschew fossil fuels for decades, only to be scrupulously ignored.

 

Sure, the developing world pays lip service to the demands of elite opinion, but it doesn’t comply. Why would it? Do the rewards associated with subservience outweigh the benefits associated with rapid economic development, which can only be realized with reliable, on-demand power-generation? Of course not. And what are the costs associated with recalcitrance? The invitations to next year’s forum are all but guaranteed.

 

“The challenge with politics is, we know what we need to do,” Banga continued. “The problem in the democratic world is, you probably won’t get elected again if you do it.” That sounds awfully nefarious, but it should be understood less as a statement of desire to break down democratic conventions than as an articulation of the problem radical reformers face. Their objectives are routinely thwarted by the democratic process and the thoughtless voters who participate in it. Banga’s frustration should warm the hearts of the WEF’s critics.

 

Indeed, a brief survey of the subjects on which the gathering’s attendees opine leads to the inescapable conclusion that they are hopelessly confused by the world as it is. “I like to refer to it as variable geometry,” said Secretary of State Antony Blinken during an exchange with the New York Times’ Tom Friedman on the myriad hard-power challenges facing America abroad. “And that’s what we’ve been doing.” Oh, is it? Is that what we’ve been doing? Stressing the need for “global partnerships and cooperation,” which we must apparently now euphemize into an incomprehensible mush? Well, whatever you call it, it’s not working.

 

The rapidly deteriorating threat environment in the Middle East and South Asia has consumed much of the conference’s attention — a focus summarized by the WEF event title, “Middle East Conflict: What Is the Endgame?” The answer to that question is never “neutralize terrorist groups and degrade the capability of rogue states to project power abroad.” That would make for too short an event.

 

The WEF serves primarily as a platform from which participants demonstrate their expert ability to overcomplicate simple concepts with polysyllabic pablum. “To put it in a nutshell,” said the governor of the Central Bank of France, this “will be an era of fair money probably rather than easy money, or free money.” That’s a pleasant way of saying interest rates are rising to combat the inflation driven by excessive deficit spending. It sounds nicer than informing the public that governments overspent and now you can’t afford a car loan.

 

The bromides don’t end there. “It’s clear that on some dimensions the world has become increasingly divided,” McKinsey & Company’s Bob Sternfels observed, “yet the barometer shows that when you look at the full picture, global cooperation has remained surprisingly robust over the last decade.” A careful parsing of this sentence leaves its readers wishing they hadn’t wasted the effort. “The Forum provides the structure for developing research, alliances and frameworks that promote mission-driven cooperation throughout the year,” Norway’s foreign-affairs minister, Børge Brende, opined. That is just an overly cumbersome way to say something we already knew: The WEF is a networking opportunity.

 

Politico’s John Harris summarized the parodic state into which the WEF has descended, in which the supposed best and brightest struggle to reckon with the uncooperative world. “It is not that the observations and arguments are notably dumb, though it is rare to hear something arrestingly smart,” Harris noted. It’s only that participants in these conferences tend to have expertise in precisely one field, and forums like the WEF compel them to opine on and adjudicate events so far outside their professional arenas that they have been set up to fail. “Their views are no more banal than the average person who also follows the news,” Harris concluded, “but they are typically no less so.”

 

Harris adds with undue charity that there is “no reason to pick on Davos,” but there most certainly is. If the designs of this conference’s attendees are in some way nefarious, at least its participants are feckless in their pursuit. But for the most part, the conference’s goals are not malign. They are well-intended efforts to better the condition endured by the globe’s inhabitants. Indeed, the WEF’s participants are likely to emphasize their good intentions because intentionality and self-righteous preening are the only two deliverables the conference provides. This is not a cabal cooking up a grand conspiracy. It’s just cringe.