World Economic Forum: Will Trump and Davos Herald a New World Disorder

Davos is coming just in time for the inauguration of Donald J. Trump 2.0, and Europe is anxious. Mr. Trump is like an asteroid heading for Earth, argues Hubert Védrine, a former French foreign minister, and debates about the impact will dominate the cozy, internationalist bubble that gathers each year in the pricey snow of the Swiss Alps.

Mr. Trump talks variously about huge new tariffs, about seizing Canada, Greenland and the Panama Canal, about tying American involvement in European defense not only to Europeans increasing their military spending but also decreasing their trade surplus with the United States.

Mr. Védrine and other analysts caution that Mr. Trump likes to talk big and then bargain, and that threats and issues come and go. As his former national security adviser, John Bolton once told USA Today, working in Mr. Trump’s White House was “like living in a pinball machine,” as Mr. Trump careened from one issue to another.

But one of the dominant topics in Davos is likely to be Ukraine. Mr. Trump says he wants to end the war in a day, which virtually no one takes literally, not even his special adviser for Ukraine, Keith Kellogg. Mr. Trump or no, Ukraine is slowly losing the war, and negotiations are coming to try to end the bloodshed, probably this spring.

But on what basis is the key question. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is facing high inflation and interest rates but has put his country on a wartime economy in what he presents as an existential conflict with the West. Despite very high casualties, he is so far able to replenish his losses with major financial incentives: 70 percent of his forces are contract soldiers and only 7 percent are draftees, said Zaki Laïdi, a French analyst who advised the European Union’s former foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell Fontelles.