Every January, the World Economic Forum gathers the world's economic and political elite in Davos in the supposed bid to improve the state of the world. This year's WEF summit exposed a fracture in global leadership as elite consensus sustaining the top-down world order gave way to open jockeying for nationalist power and transactional advantage.

At the centre of the Davos spectacle was President Trump's appearance and his decision to use the platform to revive his controversial call for the United States to acquire Greenland. He argued that the United States needed to secure the territory for strategic reasons, something he claimed Denmark, as the former colonial power, could not do for this semi-autonomous territory.

European leaders have been unequivocal that any use of coercive tactics by the United States to achieve this objective would risk undermining not only the NATO alliance but Western cohesion as a whole. Yet the American........

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