One wise decision of SA President Cyril Ramaphosa is to skip this week’s annual ‘schmoozefest” better known as the World Economic Forum (WEF). There at Davos, Switzerland, world leaders and CEO’s and many others will gather to take stock of the state of the world.
The WEF boasts that 60 heads of state and governments, 850 CEOs and chairs of the world’s top companies will be among the delegates. However, this week at Davos it is the in-person presence of one man, US President Donald Trump, that will hog the limelight and consume much of the media oxygen on the Swiss slopes.
Mid-level countries, their leaders and business chiefs will battle for attention when Trump and his large entourage enter Davos. His first visit to the WEF in six years is on the back of his audacious kidnapping of Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro two weeks ago and, of deep concern to US allies in Europe, his intended grab of Greenland from Denmark.
What’s changed between Trump’s last personal appearance in Davos in his first term as president and his keenly anticipated return this week, in the second year of his second term, is clear. Trump Mark 11 now acts with few constraints.
His National Security Advisor from his first term, John Bolton, explained to the Wall Street Journal the change.
Back then Bolton was told by Trump to investigate the prospect of Greenland, the world’s largest island, being acquired by the US. His response was that it wasn’t feasible, that US interests and security were well protected by a 1951 treaty and that the Danes had branded the idea ‘absurd’.
The matter was dropped and Trump turned his attention elsewhere.
Now, as the Journal advises, “Trump is more determined to demonstrate his power and has fewer people around his who are urging a different course.”
And if that means blowing up the enduring NATO alliance, a trade war with Europe and the end of Western cohesion as a bulwark against China and Russia then a great and deeply risky unwinding and decoupling awaits.
In the first Trump administration his cabinet and key staff including a broad range of experts, drawn from outside the narrow confines of MAGA (Make America Great Again).
This time, the outside experts -or in Trump argot – ‘globalists’ and ‘nonbelievers’ are absent. Trump himself relishes the lack of guardrails and restraint. In an interview with the New York Times, he advised that the only limit on his power and the use of force was ‘my own morality. My own mind…I don’t need international law.”
Critics contend this is the language of a wannabe Mafia Don, not the counsel of the leader of the Free World. But there is a lesson here beyond politics and international relations.
Constraints on executive hubris, be it independent minded directors on company boards or critical voices who offer counsel against corporate ‘groupthink’ often irritate the unbounded and the ambitious. But they are vital checks and balances embraced by wiser leaders, in both politics and business, whose decisions have big but often unintended consequences.
– Tony Leon
Executive Chairman