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DAVOS, Switzerland — In some ways, the scene in this picturesque Swiss resort town in late January is as ever. The tall evergreen forest below the Jakobshorn peak is crowned with fresh snow. The small airfield up in the mountains is packed with private jets. Phalanxes of black vans and SUVs crawl through icy streets. Beyond an elaborate security cordon, pavilions representing many of the world’s most influential tech companies, industries, and sovereign wealth funds populate storefronts, awaiting the foot traffic of the global elite who descend on this corner of the Alps every year.

Behind it all, though, there’s a profound shift. President Donald Trump is leading one of the largest U.S. delegations ever to attend the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting, where he is set to deliver an address Wednesday, at a moment when his administration seems in open conflict with the paradigms that have long defined (and have come to be caricatured by) these conclaves in Davos. His trade wars on U.S. allies and adversaries alike are unraveling webs of globalization championed here for decades. And his constant use of coercion in his foreign policy cuts against Davos’ ethos of comity and cooperation.

Trump’s speech will come days after he began threatening to impose fresh tariffs on European partners for their unwillingness to oblige his assertions that the United States must annex Greenland. He lashed out in anger at Danish and broader European obstruction over the weekend, guaranteeing that the Arctic territory would dominate conversation in Davos.

“We stand ready to engage in a dialogue based on the principles of sovereignty and territorial integrity,” read a joint statement from European countries facing U.S. tariffs over Greenland. “Tariff threats undermine transatlantic relations and risk a dangerous downward spiral.”

Trump’s extraordinary capture earlier this month of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro seemed to set new precedents, underscoring the White House’s view that the Western Hemisphere ought to be a U.S. sphere of influence. A slew of prominent foreign policy thinkers see Trump ushering in a global order where “might makes right.”

“Gunboat diplomacy is back with a vengeance,” Comfort Ero, head of the International Crisis Group, a think tank, recently said. “What do you do when international law becomes international niceties?”

The response from Davos seems more cautious and calibrated than it might have been in the past. For more than a decade, the organizers of the World Economic Forum have warned about disruptions to the international order — of fractures, crises and dysfunction that can only be solved with collective global effort. This year’s vaguer and more humble theme — “a spirit of dialogue” — may have been chosen in anticipation of the Trump-shaped wrecking ball swinging toward the forum.

“There’s a robust consensus that the world economy is entering some kind of new reality,” Mirek Dusek, a WEF managing director responsible for the annual event’s programming and business, told me. “Our role is really to be helpful as an organization, and in this moment bring protagonists together.”

At least to that end, Davos can deliver. The forum’s organizers are touting record participation, with some 65 heads of state or government in attendance, alongside dozens more finance and foreign ministers, as well as close to 2,000 prominent CEOs and business leaders. They convene at a time, as the international advocacy group Oxfam notes in its latest report, when billionaire wealth grew by some $2.5 trillion over the past year — a figure greater than the total wealth possessed by the bottom half of humanity (more than 4 billion people).

With Trump’s shadow over Davos, there’ll be little consensus over tackling inequality or perhaps any other shared global challenges. The WEF’s annual Global Risks report, which surveys more than 1,000 geopolitical and economic experts from around the world, pointed to “geoeconomic confrontation” as the prime source of short-term concern. The WEF’s latest iteration of the Global Cooperation Barometer, an index using dozens of metrics to chart how the world is getting along, declared that “multilateralism is indeed waning.”

That zeitgeist is being driven, in part, by Trump’s political project. “Trump’s central strategic insight has always been that America is better prepared than any other country to thrive in a cutthroat arena,” wrote Hal Brands, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank. “If Washington no longer wishes to sustain the liberal order, or just can’t afford to uphold it against growing challenges, perhaps it makes sense to seize the largest share of the loot.”

But the conveners in Davos don’t want pessimism to prevail. “Cooperation is like water, if it sees it’s being blocked it finds a way,” Borge Brende, a former Norwegian politician and WEF president and CEO, said during a briefing call with journalists earlier this month.

The world isn’t standing pat in the face of Trumpist disruption. Clear signals were sent in recent days by Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney, who acknowledged the shifting “new world order” on a trip to China where his government reset a long-troubled relationship while touting a “new strategic partnership.” Ottawa’s overtures would not have happened without a year of hostility from Washington, including Trump’s statements urging Canada to become the 51st U.S. state.

“The global trading system is undergoing a fundamental change,” reducing “the effectiveness of multilateral institutions on which trading partners such as Canada and China have greatly relied,” Carney told reporters in Beijing, gesturing to the deterioration of the rules-based order and the weakening of international institutions. “This is happening fast. It’s large. It’s a rupture.”

Separately, after a quarter-century of negotiations, four South American countries sealed a free-trade agreement with the European Union. “This is the power of partnership and openness. This is the power of friendship and understanding between peoples and regions across oceans,” European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said alongside Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Rio de Janeiro on Friday. “And this is how we create real prosperity — prosperity that is shared. Because, we agree, that international trade is not a zero-sum game.”

The new alignments that are emerging place Trump’s America in a conspicuous light. “The United States will remain the most economically and militarily powerful country in the world for several more years,” wrote international relations theorist Amitav Acharya, in an essay for Foreign Policy. “But it will be absent from, if not actively hostile toward, the existing international order.”

Acharya labeled this “unique configuration” shaped by U.S. antagonism as “the world minus one.”

BRUSSELS — In a message to Norway’s prime minister, President Donald Trump linked his insistence on taking over Greenland to his grievance over not receiving the Nobel Peace Prize — adding a new twist to Trump’s stoking of a trade war that is shaking the trans-Atlantic alliance.

In the weekend text to Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Store, Trump wrote that he no longer needed to “think purely of Peace” after he didn’t win the peace prize last year — an award that the president has openly coveted and that is bestowed by the Nobel Committee in Norway.

Trump then questioned the “ownership” of Greenland by Denmark, a NATO ally, and repeated his ambition for the U.S. to take “complete and total control” of the autonomous Danish territory.

The White House confirmed the authenticity of the message, with White House deputy press secretary Anna Kelly saying that Trump “is confident Greenlanders would be better served if protected by the United States from modern threats in the Arctic region.”

Store confirmed Trump’s leaked message in a statement Monday. He said Trump was responding to a text that Store had sent on behalf of Norway and Finland, conveying opposition to U.S. tariffs against European nations rejecting the takeover of Greenland. “We pointed to the need to de-escalate and proposed a telephone conversation,” Store said.

The attempt to defuse tensions seems not to have worked. Trump’s reply came shortly after.

“Considering your Country decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for having stopped 8 Wars PLUS, I no longer feel an obligation to think purely of Peace, although it will always be predominant, but can now think about what is good and proper for the United States of America,” Trump wrote in the text, which was first reported by PBS.

Store said he made his support for Greenland and Denmark clear, and that he has repeatedly explained to Trump that it is up to the Nobel Committee, not the Norwegian government, to award the annual peace prize.

On Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent sought to reframe the narrative. “It’s a complete canard to think President Trump’s action on Greenland is due to” not receiving the Nobel Prize, he told reporters on the sidelines of the World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

European retaliation, he added, would be “very unwise.”

Trump’s bid to buy or seize Greenland — effectively a demand to grab a NATO ally’s territory against its will — and to unleash a trade war with European leaders who disapprove, has sparked the greatest trans-Atlantic crisis in generations.

U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer said Monday that it would be “completely wrong” for Trump to slap tariffs on European nations in his push for Greenland — even as Starmer sought to preserve the relationship with the United States which is vital to European security.

The British leader’s comments added to mounting European pushback. French President Emmanuel Macron has likened Trump’s declaration to a form of “intimidation,” and Swedish Prime Minister Ulf Kristersson described it as blackmail. Even Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, a Trump ally, called it a “mistake.”

In remarks to reporters on Monday, Starmer denounced economic coercion against allies as the wrong approach to resolving disagreements. He described tariffs as harmful to British workers and businesses. “A trade war over Greenland is no one’s interest,” Starmer said, calling for discussions between Greenland, Europe, and the United States.

Still, he declined to say whether he would support calls within the European Union, of which the U.K. is no longer a member, for retaliation against Washington.

Trump has said controlling Greenland is necessary for national security reasons — a point disputed by allies and some members of Congress who rebutted the president’s claim that the Arctic territory faces imminent security risks from Russia and China. Trump’s unwillingness, so far, to back down risks driving a deeper wedge in the Western alliance or, some fear, causing an irreparable break.

After months of trying to keep Trump onside, European policymakers are weighing options to retaliate. The continent’s top leaders still stress they would much rather avoid an escalation, but Trump’s threats are fueling a growing chorus of calls from lawmakers and politicians for European leaders to stand up for the continent and fire back.

“Appeasement has failed,” wrote Javi López, a lawmaker from Spain and vice president of the European Parliament. “Europe can only protect its sovereignty (from Ukraine to Greenland) by reducing dependencies, strengthening its deterrence, and using without limits its most powerful tool: access to the world’s largest single market.”

If diplomatic efforts fail, the E.U.’s arsenal of trade tools includes imposing tariffs on a list of more than $100 billion worth of American goods, which EU officials prepared last year but suspended to sign a trade deal with Trump.

Another option would be triggering an instrument often dubbed the bloc’s trade “bazooka,” which would allow for targeting American services in Europe — a major profit center for U.S. tech giants.

European Union leaders have warned that Russia stands to benefit from the rift at NATO. On Monday, the Kremlin spokesperson, Dmitry Peskov, appeared to stir the pot by telling reporters that by taking action on Greenland, Trump stood to make history one way or another.

Peskov said there was “a lot of disturbing information” recently and that he would not comment about “our plans regarding Denmark and Greenland.”

Aside from “whether this is good or bad, whether it complies with international law or not,” he added, “there are international experts who believe that by resolving the issue of Greenland’s accession, Trump will go down in history, not only in U.S. history, but also in world history. It is difficult to disagree with these experts.”

Russia, preoccupied with its war in Ukraine, has largely stood by while Trump ordered military strikes on Venezuela and seized Moscow’s longtime ally President Nicolás Maduro. That has left Russian President Vladimir Putin’s credibility on the world stage diminished as Trump flexes his muscles among friends and foes alike.

Ambassadors of the E.U.’s 27 nations debated the possibility of retaliation against Washington during a closed-door meeting in Brussels on Sunday, although there was a broad preference to try to de-escalate — as they have done after Trump’s previous rounds of tariffs.

European leaders are headed to the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, hoping that face-to-face meetings with Trump will talk him down from the intensifying confrontation. The president has declared the new tariffs on eight countries would start Feb. 1 unless they acquiesce to his plan to acquire Greenland.

Those European nations — Britain, Denmark, France, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden — recently sent troops to Greenland in small numbers for joint exercises with the Danish military. European leaders cast the deployment as a sign of NATO’s commitment to protecting the Arctic in response to Trump’s warnings that Arctic security was at risk.

Because the EU operates as a single trading bloc, the imposition of tariffs on some of its 27 nations could affect all of them, European officials said.

Leaders of Denmark and Greenland have said repeatedly that they welcome deeper U.S. economic and security involvement, but that the vast island territory — which Trump covets for its strategic Arctic location and natural resources — is not for sale.

“Blackmail between friends is obviously unacceptable,” French Finance Minister Roland Lescure said in Berlin on Monday. If the U.S. tariff threats come to fruition, Lescure added, “we Europeans must remain united and coordinated in our response and, above all, be prepared to make full use of the European Union’s instruments.”

France has pushed for Europe to take a harder line against Trump, while many of its EU neighbors preferred restraint. On Monday, however, German Finance Minister Lars Klingbeil echoed the sentiment, saying the EU should consider using the “toolbox for responding to economic blackmail.”