As Davos braces for Hurricane Donald, European leaders mull how to strike back

Early on Monday morning, President Trump’s vanguard held a prayer service in a church it has taken over on the main Davos promenade. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and others gave thanks for the first 250 years of the great American experiment, which has left their country the richest and most powerful on the planet.

Yesterday, in the nearby Davos conference centre, Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen offered secular prayers for the US to see reason, ditch its “new imperialism” and offer Europeans a little respect.

“Let’s not waste time with crazy ideas,” France’s president said, sporting reflective aviators in the style of a post-match boxer. “We do prefer respect to bullies, science to conspiracy theories and the rule of law to brutality.”

The EU’s von der Leyen warned of a “dangerous downward spiral” if Trump went ahead with tariffs against countries that dare to resist his plan to take control of Greenland. Europe would be “unflinching, united and proportional” in its efforts to stop him, she said.

And so the stage is set. Trump is due to speak on Wednesday at 2:30pm local time. There are rumours cell phone networks will be switched off while he talks. In one sense Davos can’t believe its luck. Last year it was flirting with irrelevance; this year it’s the centre of the world. But it may also be the focus of a global nervous breakdown as Trump’s magical thinking comes to the setting for Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain in a fleet of helicopters all too reminiscent of Apocalypse Now.

Europe’s leaders could have prepared for Trump with bland preemptive fudge. They didn’t. Von der Leyen pointed out that while the US trumpets America First and a new geopolitics of brute force, the EU has signed a free trade deal 25 years in the making with most of South America, and is about to sign one with India designed to connect and enrich 1.4 billion people.

Her use of the word “proportionate” may have been a reference to tariffs the EU could impose on $93bn of imports from the US if Trump doesn’t blink, and that would still leave in reserve the Anti-Coercion Instrument, also known as the bloc’s “trade bazooka”.

Macron has been a strong advocate of the “bazooka”, a law that allows the EU to respond to economic blackmail by non-EU countries. Starmer is less keen, and has been praised for his conciliatory tone by the US House speaker Mike Johnson, who is on a trip to London. But these are febrile times and the large Downing Street team at Davos will be recalibrating hour by hour in its efforts to stay close to both sides.

So will he blink? In public there is little sign of it. In private there is talk that what he really wants is a giant real estate deal for Greenland, with purchase prices fluctuating between the hundreds of billions and $2tn, potentially financed using the proceeds of an American sovereign wealth fund. A source close to ongoing US-UK talks would not say whether such a prospect was seriously being entertained, but said it was clear Trump “wants a deal”.

The alternative? Tariffs that the IMF’s chief economist, Pierre-Olivier Gourinchas, says will cause a “spiral of escalation” that damages world economic growth, currently at a resilient 3.3% in 2026 thanks to AI, but with plenty of downside risk.

“Faced with the brutalisation of the world, France and Europe must defend an effective multilateralism, because it serves our interests and those of all who refuse to submit to the rule of force,” Macron said. “It’s not a time for new imperialism or new colonialism. This is a time of cooperation” , he said, to tackle the three great global challenges of security, growth and climate change.

“The trouble is that Europe’s not unified, and these massive trade cut-offs are a very crude weapon,” says Kenneth Rogoff, chess grandmaster and chair of international economics at Harvard. “Xi [Jinping] used a surgeon’s knife to get back at Trump, and that was very effective. If you try to use some blunt weapon it’s very hard to work.”

Meanwhile, figures released yesterday as part of the Edelman Trust Barometer reveal that nationalism is “pervasive” and extending into the commercial world. Its yearly survey showed a deep preference for domestic over multinational brands (31 points in Canada and 29 points in Germany) and that 70% of its respondents now are hesitant or unwilling to trust someone who has different values, information sources, approaches to societal problems, or backgrounds than them. Rising insularity is a theme that stands in sharp contrast to the World Economic Forum’s own theme: “The spirit of dialogue.”

Photographs by Markus Schreiber/AP, Fabrice Coffrini / AFP via Getty Images