At the table or on the menu? Europe wakes up to a world without order
EU leaders appear to have finally accepted they are facing a new era of great power competition – the question now is how they respond
Nor was it just the meeting on the sidelines with Nato chief Mark Rutte, which produced a formula to defuse immediate tensions by designating US military bases on the island as sovereign territory and getting Trump to drop his related tariff threat.
Instead, the relief appeared to come from a different kind of release: the catharsis of saying the quiet part out loud.
Over the course of the week, a succession of European leaders took to the Davos stage to acknowledge publicly what had long been discussed in private, and which many other parts of the world had taken as a given for years: that the rules-based order on which modern Europe was built had gone.
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Trump tells Davos ‘make your products in America’ or pay tariffs