Donald Trump: was America first at Davos?

Donald Trump declared America “open for business” at the World Economic Forum in Davos today - but will world leaders care to come calling?

A year ago, the world’s financial, political and intellectual leaders in Davos were “mortified by Trump’s election and the rise of populism around the world”, says Time magazine writer Molly Ball. “But the destabilising president who once seemed like an existential threat now seems more like a harmless diversion.”

Indeed, some commentators are asking whether the global elite now consider America first - or last.

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A somewhat-restrained Trump insisted today that this is the “perfect time” to invest in the US, citing a buoyant stock market, high consumer, business and manufacturing confidence, and tax cuts that have brought the top-line US corporate tax rate down from 35% to 21%.

“America is open for business and we are competitive once again,” said the president. “The world is experiencing the resurgence of a strong and prosperous America.”

Trump also repeated the mantra that the US team in Davos has been spouting for days: “‘America First’ doesn't mean America alone.”

So what does it mean?

Trump’s Davos address put him at the centre of a gathering that represents the “free-trade global order” he has so often attacked, The Wall Street Journal says.

Mission impossible?

Trump faced “a difficult assignment in convincing his audiences of business titans, politicians and top officials at international organisations that his nationalist viewpoint is a good fit for the rest of the world”, says CNN.

In the run-up to his speech, global leaders sought to offer a world view at odds with Trump’s isolationist agenda.

“Without always naming the United States”, the leaders of “Brazil, India, Canada and Italy all said they disagree with what they believe is an anti-free trade stance from the world’s biggest economy”, reports CNBC.

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said: “We are working very hard to make sure our neighbour to the south recognises how good Nafta [the North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement] is and that it has benefited not just our economy but his economy and the world’s economy.”

“The whole world is concerned that the United States is disengaging from the global trade arena,” said Cecilia Malmstrom, trade minister for the EU. “I’m extremely concerned.”

Moving on

As for Trump’s speech, “the question is whether he’s here to be congratulated by the billionaires of Davos or to scold them on behalf of the people who elected him”, Robert A. Johnson, president of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, told The New York Times. “He will act like he’s doing both.”

But the biggest takeaway from the US president’s speech may actually be its lack of potency.

“A year ago, everyone thought Trump was just fascinating,” Yale historian Snyder told Molly Ball. “I spend a lot of my life in Europe, and what I see is that the Europeans have moved on. America no longer matters.”

Nicholas Dungan, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council, told CNN that Trump is going for show rather than substance.

“In terms of global policy, he has nothing to say to the people of Davos,” Dungan said. “If he is the ‘stable genius’ of his own description, he will realise at the World Economic Forum that the rest of the planet is moving quite swiftly to fill the void of US leadership in the global system which the US itself created.”