Davos 2026

Posted on: 15 January 2026

Anyone who has played poker knows the game changes nature when one player accumulates too many chips. He is no longer playing cards. He raises the stakes on every hand, forces everyone else to risk everything on every decision, waits for someone to run out of money. The best cards do not win. The player who can afford to lose longest wins.

Davos opens Monday. Theme: "A Spirit of Dialogue". Trump arrives with the largest delegation in the forum's history. Five cabinet secretaries, Kushner, sixty-four heads of state. All-time record. Oil company CEOs return en masse after years of treating the forum as enemy territory. Klaus Schwab has resigned. His replacement: Larry Fink of BlackRock.

Some think this is a positive signal. All this interest, all this participation.

No. This is the moment everyone shows up to see who inherits what.

The mechanism is as old as power itself: preference falsification. Everyone knows the system is finished. No one can say it. If you are a CEO and declare multilateralism dead, your share price collapses Monday morning. If you smile and talk about dialogue, you buy time to empty the safe. So everyone smiles. Everyone speaks of cooperation. Everyone knows the others are lying. No one can afford to be the first to say it.

The court of Louis XVI worked exactly this way. Everyone knew. Everyone danced. Each one hoped the collapse would come after their turn.

But there is something more here.

For decades Davos operated on an implicit pact: co-opt the powerful to civilise them. Power was invited to the table with the expectation it would accept the rules. The Americans, though strongest, played by shared rules. The weak got predictability. The strong got legitimacy. It worked.

What is happening now is total inversion. Trump is not attacking Davos from outside. He is colonising it. The largest delegation in history is not respect for the institution. It is a hostile takeover. The forum that was meant to civilise American power is becoming the echo chamber of its unilateralism.

And here is the point no one wants to see.

When you have more chips than everyone else combined, you have two options. Play by the rules, win gradually, keep the table active. Or raise the stakes until no one else can follow. The first works if you need the other players. The second works if you have calculated that you gain more from chaos than from order.

The United States has made this calculation. Largest economy in the world. Reserve currency. Dominant military. Energy self-sufficiency. Every shared rule is a constraint. Every supranational institution is a place where the weak coalesce to limit you.

The strategy becomes obvious: overturn the table. See who remains standing.

This is not madness. It is rational calculation that produces collective madness. In a chaotic world, whoever has the most resources wins. In a regulated world, they must share. Trump is not mad. His advisers are not mad. They are optimising for the only player who can afford chaos.

The problem is that this logic is contagious. If one abandons the rules, the others must adapt or die. Europe is not trying to save multilateralism. It is trying to work out how to survive without it. China likewise. Everyone is quietly abandoning the idea of a shared system. Everyone is accumulating autonomous survival capacity.

The return of the oil CEOs is the signal. For years Davos treated them as defendants, relics of the past, enemies of the transition. Now they all return together, the same year Trump brings half his administration. This is not coincidence. It is recognition that the wind has changed. Those who produce the energy that makes the physical world function matter more than those who produce documents about the sustainable future.

"A Spirit of Dialogue" is not unconscious irony. It is the "everything under control" sign on the door while inside they empty the safes.

There is one thing those watching from outside must understand. The game we thought we were playing no longer exists. The rules we believed were shared were shared only as long as it suited everyone. The moment the strongest player decided it suited him better to overturn the table, they evaporated.

This is not the end of the world. It is the end of a world. What comes next is unclear.

But anyone still playing by the old rules has already lost. They just do not know it yet.