US global cooperation may help to improve world affairs

THE World Economic Forum (WEF) starts its annual meeting in Davos on Tuesday with key guests including US President Donald Trump. This year's session, on the theme of creating a shared future in a fractured world, will focus on how best to renew international cooperation in a global context in which "geopolitical fractures have re-emerged on multiple fronts with wide-ranging political, economic and social consequences".

Ironically, given that Mr Trump will be in attendance at the WEF, it is his own "America First" vision which has been a driver of the breakdown in international cooperation in the last 12 months by undermining a range of global agreements, including the Paris climate change treaty. While he has significant support - in the US and internationally - with his agenda, it will not be very popular in Davos.

A key reason for this year's Davos theme is that some three decades on from the promise of the late 1980s and early 1990s, which saw the collapse of Soviet Communism, many expectations about how the post-Cold War world would look have been dashed, including around international cooperation. The WEF itself came into being in 1987, re-branding from the European Management Forum, to provide a global platform for dialogue.