By James Cullis
Donald Trump’s Davos speech earlier this year generated significant interest and debate. It was analytically notable for the way it challenged the conventional historical narrative of political economy.[1] At the heart of his critique, he made plain his objections to liberal capitalism and the international order, stating: “In recent decades, it became conventional wisdom in Washington and European capitals that the only way to grow a modern Western economy was through ever-increasing government spending, unchecked mass migration and endless imports.” (Trump, 2026, Davos) Although often dismissed as national populism, these comments function as an intervention in debates over the historical rise of modern political economy. Trump’s speech directly contested the Smithian‑inspired commercial‑society narrative articulated by István Hont in Jealousy of Trade.[2] The ethos of the speech attacked the idea of open markets and the free exchange of goods and services.
In chapter two of Jealousy of Trade, Hont reconstructs the eighteenth‑century moment in which political economy emerged as a response to the structural limits imposed on sovereign states by commercial society. As global markets expanded and mercantilism waned, states found their capacity to determine their own destinies increasingly constrained by interdependence. Trump’s Davos narrative rejects the merits of this historical settlement by arguing that the shift toward global interdependence fundamentally weakened state sovereignty. “This was the path … [that] Western governments very foolishly followed, turning their backs on everything that makes nations rich and powerful and strong.” (Trump, 2026, Davos) By insisting that the state remains the decisive actor in world markets, Trump rejects the idea that globalisation represents an irreversible structural condition. For him, economic interdependence has been neither historically inevitable nor justified. On Hont’s account, by contrast, globalisation generates structural constraints on the nation‑state.[3]
Trump’s speech embraces a post‑liberal interpretation of globalisation in which the liberal order appears as a force that corrodes the state’s internal harmony. On this view, the post‑war international economic settlement progressively eroded national sovereignty. Davos, therefore becomes, within Trump’s framing, the symbolic culmination of that process: a forum in which the forces of liberal capital and liberal democratic states gather to exchange ideas, thereby institutionalising the pressures he identifies as corrosive. Deep into his speech, Trump stated: “Virtually all of the so‑called experts predicted my plans to end this failed model would trigger a global recession and runaway inflation. But we have proven them wrong. It’s actually just the opposite.” (Trump, 2026, Davos) For Trump, his fiscal programme overturned what he presents as the orthodox liberal vision of political economy.
Such claims also strike directly at the heart of international relations theory since 1945. For G. John Ikenberry, the rules‑based system that emerged in the wake of the Second World War stabilised the international order by embedding states within dense networks of economic interdependence and institutionalised cooperation.[4] Through this architecture, the fortunes of individual nation‑states became mutually bound, and it was this institutionally embedded global capitalism that generated a durable sense of order. Thus, Trump’s Davos speech signals not only a wholesale rejection of the historical development of the liberal economic order outlined by Hont, but also a withdrawal from—and overturning of—the structure of international relations that has underpinned U.S. growth since 1945
The spectre of Trump’s speech directly challenged the limits that Ikenberry argues were deliberately imposed on U.S. power. For Trump, the leverage supposedly gained by the United States since the Second World War was a myth, and one that had ultimately weakened rather than strengthened American power. As highlighted above, the imposition of constraints not only ensured that the United States did not abandon its responsibilities but also generated significant economic benefits in return. In this sense, Trump’s intervention at Davos sought to overturn that trajectory by redirecting American power away from a liberal internationalist model of global order and toward a more unilateral and sovereignty‑centred strategy. This appeal to unilateralism and sovereign power was framed at one point in cultural terms: “many other Western governments very foolishly followed, turning their backs on everything that makes nations rich and powerful and strong” (Trump, 2026, Davos). Here, the point was to suggest that the liberal internationalist model weakened the internal character of states. Yet its true intended aim was also to offer an alternative vision of political economy.
Seen in this light, Trump’s speech sought to offer an alternative account of post‑1945 international history, one where the rise of globalisation had undermined the ability of states to govern themselves. Here, attention may be turned back to the final part of the quote: “everything that makes nations rich and powerful and strong” (Trump, 2026, Davos). The wording “rich and powerful and strong” is crucial as it suggests that globalisation itself has frustrated the nation’s functioning capabilities. Thus it is with this point that Trump attempted to clip the liberal narrative of global history.
One of the central premises of Trump’s speech was to depict globalisation as a historical error of political economy. Many commentators disputed the factual basis of his claim, yet Trump’s wording identifies the “so‑called experts” as responsible for assuming that the development of globalisation and the international liberal economic order was inevitable. His conflict with them begins at this point of historical interpretation.
A central interlocutor here is Thomas Hobbes and his discussion of sovereign power in Chapter 18 of Leviathan.[5] Hobbes argues that the sovereign cannot be overthrown and that no common sovereign exists between independent states. Read in the context of Trump’s speech, this point clarifies the force of his claim. Trump stated: “We never ask for anything and we never got anything. We probably won't get anything unless I decide to use excessive strength and force, where we would be, frankly, unstoppable.” (Trump, 2026, Davos) Drawing on the Hobbesian premise that, in an anarchic world, states must rely on their own power to secure their interests, Trump frames international politics as governed by force and unilateral action rather than by the cooperative norms of the post‑war commercial order. Hobbes thus provides Trump with an intellectual template that legitimises his voluntarist claim that a state may act decisively — even coercively — when no higher authority exists to restrain it.
Here, Trump’s argument draws on a Hobbesian characterisation of the international state system to challenge Hont’s account of commercial society. In doing so, he revives a pre‑commercial, mercantilist model of sovereignty that he presents as a new economic logic for the twenty‑first century. The seeds of this shift were visible in his inaugural address of January 2017, but the moment at Davos marks its most explicit articulation. Framing his argument around mercantilist assumptions, Trump criticised the principles of free trade and directed his remarks toward the French President, Emmanuel Macron:
…you've been taking advantage of the United States for 30 years... the answer is, you're going to do it. You're going to do it fast. Then if you don't, I'm putting a 25% tariff on everything that you sell into the United States, and a 100% tariff on your wines and champagnes... and you're going to do it. (Trump, 2026, Davos)
Such rhetoric targets the post‑war international commercial order premised on free trade. One indication is Trump’s claim — contrary to the conventional understanding of private enterprise — that the French government enabled its firms to “flood” the American market with French agricultural goods, thereby exploiting the American consumer.[6] This claim is analytically significant: it reframes international exchange not as a spontaneous, market‑driven process but as a field of state‑directed advantage. In doing so, Trump seeks to re‑establish a mercantilist conception of political order in which sovereigns actively manage trade flows and national wealth is tied to strategic control over economic exchange.
This position becomes clearer when attention turns to Greenland and the question of Arctic security. Trump’s assertion of US claims over the territory rests on a logic of resource sovereignty. Greenland contains significant deposits of rare‑earth minerals — notably neodymium and dysprosium — which are critical for high‑performance magnets used in electric motors, advanced computing hardware, and components of artificial‑intelligence infrastructure.[7] One estimate places Greenland’s reserves at roughly 1.5 million tonnes.[8]
Understood in these terms, Trump’s claims align with classic mercantilist understandings of the economy, centred on state‑directed accumulation of wealth through control of trade and resources. In The Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith drew a sharp distinction between productive capacity and the mere possession of resources.[9] That distinction is crucial for interpreting Trump’s actions and for understanding how his voluntarist claims collide with Hont’s structural account of commercial society. Hont treats commercial society as producing structural interdependence that constrains sovereign action; Trump’s voluntarism, grounded in state control of resources and trade, challenges that constraint.
For Trump, possession of raw minerals functions both as an index of economic strength and as the basis for a re‑emergent resource sovereignty capable of re‑territorialising economic power and overturning the logic of commercial society outlined by Hont. Trump’s Davos speech therefore reignites a contest over the history of political economy and forces a reconsideration of the limits of the commercial order.
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[1] For an analysis of Trump’s rhetorical technique, see: Raunak M. Pillai, Eunji Kim, and Lisa K. Fazio, “All the President’s Lies: Repeated False Claims and Public Opinion,” Public Opinion Quarterly 87, no. 3 (Fall 2023): 764–7.
[2] István Hont, Jealousy of Trade: International Competition and the Nation‑State in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 54-88.
[3] For a discussion of this point, see Susan Strange, The Retreat of the State: The Diffusion of Power in the World Economy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 24-36.
[4] G. John Ikenberry, Liberal Leviathan: The Origins, Crisis, and Transformation of the American World Order (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011).
[5] Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Noel Malcolm, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2012).
[6] On the topic of private enterprise and global markets, see Strange, The Retreat of the State, 24–36.
[7] Julie Michelle Klinger, Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2017), 101–105.
[8] Diogo Rosa, Per Kalvig, Henrik Stendal, and Jakob Kløve Keiding, Review of the Critical Raw Material Resource Potential in Greenland, MiMa Rapport 2023/1 (Copenhagen: Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), 2023).
[9] Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, ed. R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981).
