Davos and the year of the strong

The annual gathering of the world’s business and political leaders in the Swiss Alps closed its 2025 edition, and the week in the mountain resort delivered the themes that the year was already presenting. The panels were organized around the familiar topics, the growth, the technology, the climate, the security; the corridors, where the conference’s real business is conducted, were organized around something else, which was the return of the strong. The leaders who dominated the week were the ones who had decided that the rules of the past decade no longer applied to them, and the businesspeople who filled the conference were adjusting their plans to that discovery, which is what the annual meeting is actually for.

The tone of the week was set by the absence as much as by the presence. The world’s largest economy sent a delegation that described itself as transactional, and the description was intended and received as a warning: the partnerships that the previous decade had taken for granted, the alliances, the institutions, the commitments, were now to be renegotiated one by one. The European leaders who attended responded with the language of resilience and unity, and the language, the corridor conversations reported, was performing a function that the speeches could not, which was the coordination of the response to a partner that had become unpredictable. The conference was, for the first time in years, an occasion for the rest of the world to compare notes about the largest economy.

The technology panels carried the particular enthusiasm that the sector has brought to the meetings for a decade, and the enthusiasm this year had a sharper edge. The artificial-intelligence companies presented their roadmaps with the confidence that the markets had rewarded, and the questions from the floor, the questions about the jobs, the regulation, the energy, the trust, were asked with the politeness that the format requires and answered with the confidence that the sector maintains. The businesspeople in the corridors were placing their bets on the technology with the same care that they place their bets on everything else, and the bets were visible in the meeting schedules and the partnership announcements that the week produced.

The climate conversation at the meeting was the part that the coverage found hardest to write, because the conversation had changed shape. The pledges and the targets were still on the agenda, and the language of the climate was still present in the panels; the change was in the room, in the calculations that the delegates were making about the cost of the transition in a year of trade conflict and budget pressure. The transition was no longer the consensus project that the previous meetings had assumed; it had become a line item, and the line items are where the conference’s real decisions are made. The businesspeople were not abandoning the climate; they were pricing it, and the pricing was the news.

The value of the annual meeting has always been its timing, and the 2025 edition was timed to the first month of a year of change. The conference closed with the participants returning to their capitals and their boardrooms carrying the same conclusion, which was that the year ahead would be conducted on the terms of the strong, and that the institutions and the rules that the previous decades had built would be tested one by one. The conclusion was not announced from any stage; it was reached in the corridors, over the coffees and the dinners, by the people whose job is to be right about the future. The year of the strong had begun, and the strongest thing about it was the speed with which everyone in Davos had already adjusted.