The contradictory forces shaping world affairs

English original of article published this morning in Italian in La Stampa, on the geopolitical, economic and technological forces that will be swirling in the air during the annual Davos talkfest

One of the laziest truisms heard from political speeches, conferences or, dare I say it, newspaper columns is the claim that we live at “a time of uncertainty”. This is always true, for no one can ever know what the future holds. As 3,000 businesspeople, policymakers, media and political leaders prepare to travel to Davos, in the Swiss Alps, for the annual World Economic Forum which opens there on Monday, alas they must also prepare to hear this meaningless claim countless times.

The more meaningful reality is that today’s forces of geopolitics, economics and technology are pushing in remarkably contradictory directions. The best goal for anyone attending Davos or following it will be to try to judge the relative strength of these contradictory forces, as they interact in the coming months and years. By definition, that interaction will remain uncertain, but governments, businesses and individuals all have to make plans based on guesses about how the interaction will play out.

The Davos gathering has been taking place for more than half a century now, but it really grabbed international attention during the 1990s, which were the heyday of globalisation, of the spread of democracy and open markets following the collapse of the Soviet Union, and of the rise of China and India. What the American political scientist Samuel Huntington termed “Davos Man” was the typical business or policy-making attendee who saw globalisation as natural and desirable, and in Huntington’s view was steadily detaching him or herself from national loyalties and concerns.

Perhaps fortunately for the conference organisers, Davos Man or Woman now epitomises one of the great contradictions in world affairs. The Forum’s star speaker, President Donald Trump, is an avowed opponent of what he calls “globalism” and through the imposition last year of America’s highest import tariffs since the 1930s has been deliberately trying to reduce global trade and make businesses focus their efforts on domestic production and sales. Yet the Forum’s hottest economic and technological topic, artificial intelligence, is pushing strongly in the opposite direction.

In geopolitics there is no doubt that the adoption by America of the aggressive, bullying tactics already used by Russia and China, in economics through tariffs and in politics through military action in disregard of international law, has created an atmosphere of fear and trepidation. Even longstanding allies, such as Canada, the European NATO members, and the Japanese and South Koreans who Giorgia Meloni has just been visiting, are having to deal with attacks and insults from America. Meanwhile, however, the arrival of AI and of quantum computing is bringing the prospect of technological disruption but also potentially transformational advances in knowledge and productivity.

These technological advances know no borders and promise to make the world feel an even smaller place, in terms of how production is organised and ideas and services are exchanged. The optimism associated with that technological development is a main reason why so many stockmarkets globally rose to new highs during 2025, despite the geopolitical tensions.

Certainly, the expansion of public spending on defence, especially in Europe, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, also helped boost the share prices of defence manufacturers, but enthusiasm about technological transformation played the bigger part. In fact, one of the biggest economic and financial questions this year is that of whether the boom in tech investment might have been excessive.

Throughout history, new technologies have generated financial booms and busts, as vast amounts of money chase speculative bets on where and by whom profits may be made. Those new technologies may well still prove transformative in the long term, but the path to that transformation often involves financial crashes and bankruptcies.

Trump will arrive in Davos with the biggest US delegation that has ever attended the Forum, intending no doubt to display American power and to tell the world that geopolitics and economics now have to operate in new ways. He will not recognise the potential for a financial crash, nor the contradiction between his goal of deglobalisation and the goals of hyperglobalisation represented by some of the US technology billionaires who will be attending alongside him.

Trump is a notoriously bad listener, but both he and the tech billionaires would do well to pay attention to another of the forces that will be on display in Davos: the growing prosperity, power and relevance of an array of smaller and medium-sized powers. The aggressive superpowers may dominate the conversation about war, peace and military capabilities, but among the 65 heads of state and government attending will be many whose collective actions on trade, climate, foreign investment and migration will matter at least as much if not more than those of America, China and Russia.

At the military level the three great powers are dominant. But on all other dimensions the world is becoming more multipolar as economic power becomes more widely distributed. The countries of South-East Asia, with a combined population that exceeds that of the European Union, are now consistently growing more rapidly than is China. The EU’s recently concluded trade agreement with the Mercosur bloc in South America, which will soon be debated in the European Parliament, matters because of the greater size of those countries both as markets and as producers.

It is far from easy to assess the relative strength, for good or ill, of these contradictory forces. But the most important challenge, which is perhaps one that governments and business can have more influence over, is of how to harness these forces in a way that makes politics and economics somewhat more orderly.

For those who, like Huntington’s imaginary “Davos Man” and like most postwar American administrations before Trump, think that international institutions, agreements and shared rules and norms are the way to bring order into a naturally chaotic world, the critical challenge both at Davos and afterwards will be how to get the myriad medium-sized powers to move beyond sweet words and into co-ordinated actions.

Meloni and her Japanese counterpart, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, said all the right things in their meeting on January 16^th about co-operation over rules and institutions, to defend and even enhance the free and open international order that both say they support. But now actions are required, both at the level of the EU and of national government.

The fact that in the same week Meloni appeared in an election campaign video endorsing Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban, a man who in many respects stands against a free and open system, highlights part of the problem. Political leaders like Meloni need to decide what they really stand for, rather than showing themselves to be even more contradictory than the world that will be on display at Davos.