The Great Reset Got Reset
Davos spent years preaching a borderless, technocratic “stakeholder” future. Trump didn’t just reject it—he forced the world to admit it doesn’t work.
The World Economic Forum branded its post-COVID vision as “The Great Reset.” Klaus Schwab even put the phrase on the cover of a book.
They meant a reset toward technocracy: climate pledges, ESG scorekeeping, supranational coordination, “stakeholder” governance—always delivered from the top down, always justified as “inevitable.”
Then reality intervened: COVID, supply-chain shocks, war in Europe, energy scarcity, China’s leverage, and the hollowing out of Western industry. Now even the Forum’s own flagship risk report admits the world is entering an “Age of Competition,” where geoeconomic confrontation is the top near-term risk.
That’s not the Great Reset they wanted. But it’s the reset the world needs.
And Trump is the catalytic force that made that pivot unavoidable.
Trump didn’t invent the backlash to globalism—he made it governable, durable, and impossible to unsee.
Davos heard the obituary—on its own stage
When U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick went into Davos and declared “globalization has failed,” the reaction wasn’t polite disagreement—it was open hostility. The Financial Times reported jeers at a dinner and noted Christine Lagarde walking out.
That moment is bigger than Lutnick’s phrasing. It’s bigger than one dinner.
It signaled something Davos hates to admit: the old orthodoxy is no longer merely contested outside the room. It’s being challenged inside the cathedral.
Offshoring didn’t make us richer. It made us weaker.
For 30 years, the elite story was simple: global labor arbitrage would deliver cheaper goods, higher corporate margins, and peace through interdependence. The costs—lost factories, lost skills, broken towns—were treated as “creative destruction.”
But the research that undermines that story isn’t a right-wing blog post. It’s mainstream economics.
David Autor, David Dorn, and Gordon Hanson’s “China Shock” work found that import competition from China had large, persistent negative effects on U.S. local labor markets—and that import competition explains a significant share of the manufacturing employment decline.
That’s the heart of the matter: offshoring didn’t just move production. It exported capability—the practical know-how of making things at scale. Once that capability leaves, “innovation” becomes a slogan. Supply chains become a dependency. And national resilience becomes a press release.
“Net Zero” without industry is dependency by design
Lutnick’s now-famous battery line—why pledge “Net Zero” if you don’t even make the batteries—hits because it exposes the moral performance embedded in Western climate politics. Europe can mandate electrification and promise decarbonization. But if the critical inputs are made elsewhere, then the policy is less “green” than it is geopolitical surrender.
The Forum itself now describes the world as “rewiring” around industrial policy, supply-chain relocation, and financial realignment—the very opposite of the frictionless-globalization story it sold for years.
That’s the quiet confession: the transition can’t be sustained by speeches and targets. It requires capacity—mines, refining, manufacturing, energy, logistics, skilled labor, and secure inputs.
The “center-left” has already admitted the old model failed
If you want proof this isn’t just “Trump people talking,” look at the policy language Democrats themselves adopted.
Jake Sullivan’s 2023 Brookings speech openly argued for renewing American economic leadership through public investment, supply-chain resilience, and rebuilding industrial strength—explicitly rejecting the idea that maximum market integration automatically serves the national interest.
And Dani Rodrik’s famous “political trilemma” argument—cited and debated across the mainstream—states you can’t simultaneously have deep hyper-globalization, national sovereignty, and democratic politics. Something has to give.
That’s the pivot in a nutshell: you can’t run a democracy like a spreadsheet. When policy is outsourced to global technocrats, you don’t get harmony—you get backlash.
Here’s what Trump changed: he moved the Overton window—and locked it in
Trump didn’t create the structural problems. He exposed them, named them, and—most importantly—made them politically actionable.
In 2018, Trump used Section 301 to target China’s technology-transfer and IP practices and set the precedent that trade policy is also national security policy. The Congressional Research Service summarized that the Trump administration imposed Section 301 tariffs across about two-thirds of U.S. imports from China (across four rounds).
Then the “unthinkable” happened: the next administration didn’t roll that architecture back. It kept it—and in some categories expanded it. A Cambridge American Journal of International Law note describes Biden’s decision to “add some, increase others, and maintain” Trump’s China tariffs.
That continuity is the real reset. And the Left and the TDS perps cannot walk this back or argue that it was a failure in any way.
It tells every boardroom and every foreign ministry the same thing: the era of cheap moral posturing with outsourced production is over. The United States is now willing—across party lines—to prioritize resilience, re-industrialization, and strategic independence over globalist purity.
Even the Wall Street Journal has framed Trump’s tariff posture as an attempt to “bring down the curtain” on the era of globalization.
Davos can’t “Great Reset” its way out of this.
The WEF built its influence by presenting a single integrated story: global governance, global markets, global standards. But its own Global Risks Report now leads with geoeconomic confrontation—because that’s what the world has become.
Even the IMF warns about the costs of fragmentation—meaning it accepts fragmentation as a defining trend, not a conspiracy theory.
That’s where we are: the institutions that sold the old model are now publishing memos about how to survive its collapse.
The reset we need. And got!!
Let Davos keep its conferences. Let them keep their panels about “stakeholders.”
But nations should keep what actually matters:
Borders that mean something.
Energy policy that privileges security over symbolism
An industrial base that can build the essentials
Supply chains that don’t become choke chains
And a moral framework that puts citizens first—because that is why God created government!
The Great Reset crowd wanted a world run by unelected planners, with nation-states treated like outdated software.
Trump forced the opposite reset: a return to sovereignty, production, and the hard truth that liberty and independence require capacity.
That isn’t isolation.
That’s adulthood.
And make no mistake at all. We would not be having this conversation without Trump and his tariffs.