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When the skies over the Swiss resort of Davos next fill with over 1,000 private jets bearing the elites of the world to discuss its fate, the Teutonic man behind it all may no longer be there.

Klaus Martin Schwab, born during WWII to a Nazi factory manager using forced labor to make flamethrowers, is Mr. Globalism. Even those who don’t know his name have seen that face with its cold fish stare through the rimmed eyeglasses looking back at them from under the towering futura font, slim and minimalist, of a solemn address at a World Economic Forum event.

“As I enter my 88th year, I have decided to step down from the position of Chair and as a member of the Board of Trustees, with immediate effect,” Klaus announced with dryly punctilious precision, declaring his departure while telling us nothing about why he’s leaving.

One reason may be that the WEF is investigating Schwab’s alleged withdrawal of cash from ATMs and use of the WEF to pay for hotel room massages, but the WEF founder has been accused of worse in the past.

But the real reason may be all the empty seats at the last World Economic Forum’s Davos event.

Not only Trump, who delivered virtual remarks, but most world leaders stayed home from 2025’s AI-themed Davos. Apart from Ukraine’s Zelenskyy, who can be counted on to show up at garage sales, dinner theaters and children’s puppet shows as long as there’s a chance photos will be taken, the WEF had to make do with personal addresses from the likes of South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, the UN Secretary General, and the European Commission president.

The globalists, failed state leaders, and CEOs looking to mingle still come, but Davos is dying.

Klaus and Davos both outlived their moment and the movement. Globalism remains a compelling force as a political reality, but its ideological momentum has run out. Conservatives hate the WEF and entire political movements have been based on running against globalism. Leftists want their internationalism in the form of riots and terrorism, not glorified TED talks with Bill Gates and elderly German academic bureaucrats selling them watered-down Marxism.

The general public never had much faith in the Eurocratic vision that the world would be run by an unaccountable world government of elite bureaucrats, academic experts and billionaire philanthropists holding conferences in various resorts to discuss how much light rail to build and how many patients with incurable diseases on national health insurance to euthanize.

But if Klaus were to blame anyone for destroying globalism’s credibility, it would be his former messiah, Barack Obama, who seemed like he had been cloned at Davos to accomplish the WEF’s goals. Instead, Americans got a taste of Davos and ran as far as they could the other way. Obama’s Arab Spring flooded Europe with Muslim mass migration and woke the continent from the slumbering haze of childless elderly government workers sleepwalking into the sunset.

By the time Schwab was using the pandemic to call for a “global reset”, the slick blend of corporate buzzwords and NGO marketing looked like an evil tyranny to millions of people. The Davosites had gotten their way and left behind ruin and misery on a global scale, and as the 1,000 private jets continued to fly to Davos, it was all too clear that they were still not done.

The one thing much of America and Europe now agree on is a burning hatred for the establishment. And globalism in its full flower at the WEF is the ultimate establishment. The WEF and its allied billionaire philanthropists helped platform and fund a militant activist class, but from Obama to the street rioters, that class doesn’t want to be seen in public with the WEF.

Schwab’s 2025 WEF pitch for “constructive optimism” and collaboration through AI fell flat.

Ironically, with AI, Schwab’s Fourth Industrial Revolution seems more plausible than ever, but no one is cheering the dystopia of digital automation even as everyone seems to be diving in. It’s a world that seems to echo the WEF’s old pitch of “you’ll own nothing and you’ll be happy”, many believe the first part, but few believe the second part. And no one outside Davos is happy.

The illusion of a global world order, a project with troubling roots in Europe’s post-fascist systems, came apart even before Trump took office. Nationalist governments run for office promising that unhitching from globalism will make their countries and societies better. Brexit was not a one-off but a major moment in a grand global uncoupling that continues today.

President Trump’s dismantling of America’s participation in globalist institutions is a serious blow to the order that Schwab had tried to impose, but it wouldn’t be possible if there hadn’t been a systemic loss of faith in the system embodied by Davos conferences, McKinsey contracts, expert opinions, multilateral talks, think tank papers and whatever Bill Gates, Bloomberg, Soros, the Amazon founder’s ex-wife and the Apple co-founder’s widow are funding this year.

At last year’s Davos event, Schwab complained that, “geopolitically, our world is more interconnected, yet paradoxically, more divided than ever” and urged that “to break this cycle, we need a paradigm shift, we must rebuild trust” touting “100 initiatives” bringing together “the best experts throughout the year at our headquarters in Geneva, and throughout the world, to make tangible progress in finding solutions for the key challenges on the global agenda.”

But Klaus was selling something that no one was buying anymore. Davos is a club for men and women whose institutional power is great, but whose hold on events and the public has faded. That’s why world leaders have been staying away, leaving it to CEOs to abuse shareholder funds to subsidize Schwab’s Swiss globalist gab getaway. And not even Klaus could keep it up.

After Klaus, the WEF falls to Børge Brende, a former Norwegian minister who already serves as its CEO to be its public face. Unfortunately, like Schwab, it’s the face of a James Bond villain. But that’s already how most people see globalism. What used to be sold to the public as a more efficient process of fixing problems in the third world has turned the first world into the third.

Globalism, like Davos, is a scam, its promise of fixing problems through convergence only converges the problems on those parts of the world foolish enough to try to fix them. The Arab Spring didn’t just make the Middle East and North Africa worse, it also made Europe worse. Promising to save the planet has made life worse for Dutch farmers and American workers.

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings,” Winston Churchill, who had been at war with the system represented by the Schwabs, asserted. “The inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” The WEF has played a role in sharing miseries, but those miseries are more likely to be found in rust belt cities in America and England than in the resort playgrounds of Davos. Every WEF idea somehow makes life worse for ordinary people and better for Davos attendees. And few still believe that’s some sort of coincidence.

Davos urged corporations to act like NGOs and NGOs to act like corporations. Billionaires were told to think like politicians and bring about positive change. National leaders were encouraged to think like world leaders. Out of this goulash of globalism has come a much worse world in which people no longer feel represented by those they elect and believe that they are being governed by an unelected tyranny of self-proclaimed billionaire world leaders like Bill Gates.

And they’re sick and tired of it.

Klaus Schwab’s belated retirement is incomplete. A proper Auf Wiedersehen from him would have been to take down the signs, pull down the curtain and put an end to the WEF.