You can listen to Trump’s speech at Davos if you want, but let me save you the trouble: it sucked. A tiresome laundry list of exaggerations, lies, and denigrations delivered in a droning monologue; it surely had the audience asking themselves, “I valet checked my private plane for this?”

The World Economic Forum at Davos has always been the world’s most exclusive circle jerk. A plummy gathering for the waddle-necked world elite to congratulate themselves on their genius. Deals negotiated over canapes and sips of champagne. (Not for nothing, but Americans better drink up on their bubbly before Trump’s threatened European tariffs kick in.) It’s easy to poke fun at the puffery, but such gatherings have a purpose beyond the glad-handing. They’re the WD-40 that used to keep the global economic pipeline all nice and lubed.

No more.

Trump’s second term is about unraveling what was—you know, what we used to call “democracy”—in favor of a risky, 19th-century approach to global politics in which the strong colonize the weak (Venezuela, Ukraine, Greenland) and carve up the world according to their parochial interests.

Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney made that point abundantly clear in his address, baldly stating........

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