Klaus Schwab’s retirement and subsequent fall from grace symbolize the tectonic shifts occurring in the current global order. Schwab’s life’s work was to build a globalist world order governed by international elites and the United Nations. He founded and ran the World Economic Forum (WEF) for decades to promote this vision of global governance for the good of the people of the world.
Schwab and his compatriots had grand ambitions to reshape the global order with a “Great Reset.” WEF’s annual conference in Davos was arguably the most prestigious gathering of global elites in the 2010s. Policy decisions, global priorities, international cooperation, and many initiatives flowed out of this gathering. The Davos gathering pushed Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) criteria around the world as part of Schwab’s vision to promote “stakeholder capitalism.”
During the pandemic, the world saw the controlling totalitarian impulse behind Schwab’s globalist agenda for what it was. The public backlash post-COVID was severe. In 2022, the Davos conference started losing steam. In 2023 and 2024, cracks began to show. And by 2025, the Davos conference had largely become a joke. People around the world rejected their top-down global elitism.
Schwab saw his dream of global stakeholder capitalism almost realized. Then he watched it collapse.
But with Schwab out of the picture, and the global order he championed in ruins, what’s next? Trump’s success, which is emblematic of many right-wing populist movements around the world, was driven in part by renewed concerns for security and innovation.
The global elites were largely asleep at the wheel, or worse, complicit, in the stagnation of Europe and the aggressive expansion by China. In fact, the ESG movement, and the western environmental movement more broadly, tangled western countries in costly red tape while largely giving China a pass. “Nation-first” policy prioritizes domestic economic development and rapid innovation. Both improve a country’s strategic position internationally while also improving citizens’ standards of living.
Many populist nationalists don’t want any international “order” at all. But can nation-first really work without reference to the rest of the world? Populists sometimes demean the “rules-based international order” of the 1990s as a front for Davos-style elites to manipulate everyone else. This characterization, though largely unfair, has led to calls for “decoupling” from other countries in favor of nation-first agendas.
Hellbound and Down 