A most unlikely proposition emerged this week in Davos. Larry Fink, interim co-head of the World Economic Forum, proposed moving the annual gathering of the world’s ultra-elite to Detroit or Dublin. The WEF, he said, should ‘start doing something new: showing up – and listening – in the places where the modern world is actually built.’

This is the least of the forum’s worries. Davos this year moved so far from its customary mission that its location hardly matters. An organisation founded to improve the world’s condition and promote global integration – the kind of place where chief executives would routinely ink and announce multi-billion dollar, cross-border deals – has turned into a geopolitical demolition derby.

Davos’ transformation has been gradual. There have been meetings devoted to climate change and ESG more broadly. There have been meetings where questions of global inequality took centre stage. Geopolitics, too, is ever present.

But if geopolitics has always been an undercurrent at Davos, this year it turned into a riptide that threatened to sweep the entire enterprise out to sea. An historically large US delegation arrived determined to smash the meeting to pieces and just about succeeded. Economic nationalism and strongman brute force – and the forces pushing back against them – dominated. It’s almost worth........

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