Donald Trump’s address at Davos 2026 may eventually be remembered as more than another unscripted outburst dressed up as policy. It may mark the moment Europe was publicly reminded—on live television—that NATO’s famed “alliance of equals” has always had a very loud first violin.
For the first time since 1945, European leaders shifted uneasily in their seats, biting diplomatic tongues, as a superior military power ranted, lectured, and threatened. The room felt less like Davos and more like a colonial governor’s office—minus the ceiling fan.
For much of Africa and the Global South, this scene was oddly familiar. This is precisely the posture Europe perfected from the 1960s backward: the sermonizing, the impatience, the assumption that power grants moral clarity. Since the 1960s, this posture has largely remained—but in disguise.
Today, Trump speaks of “buying Greenland from Denmark without force” in much the same way the British Crown once “negotiated” the annexation of Lagos in 1861—after a polite prelude of gunboats. In both cases, the people and sovereignty of the territory are incidental. What goes around, it turns out, does come around. Europe is finally sampling its own bitter medicine—without anesthesia.
The United States, for its part, looked less like a confident empire and more like a cornered animal lashing out. Outsmarted economically by China, outflanked diplomatically by BRICS, and increasingly isolated in multilateral forums it once designed and dominated, Washington appears to be shedding the silk gloves of soft power. In their place, it has reached for the only joker left in the deck: unrivalled military might.
It is an impressive card—no doubt—but also a revealing one. Military dominance can intimidate, but it cannot indefinitely substitute for economic leadership, technological trust, or moral authority. Empires that shout too loudly often do so because fewer people are listening.
China, meanwhile, has chosen the far less theatrical option: lying low. Not because it lacks ambition, but because it understands timing. China knows it does not yet need—or want—a military confrontation. Fighting at the building phase of one’s economic engine is a rookie mistake. Only a fool fights on the timetable of his rival. The wise wait, accumulate strength, and choose their own moment.
Ironically, this was once America’s own playbook.
A century ago, while Britain and other European empires ruled the waves, the United States focused inward—building factories, railroads, universities, and industrial capacity. Europe mocked American education as crude, American goods as inferior, and American culture as unsophisticated. Trade barriers were erected. Propaganda flowed freely.
Then came 1939.
By 1945, it was the same “inferior” America that had rescued Europe from Hitler, put down the money for rebuilding Western Europe and Japan through the Marshall Plan, and quietly replaced the old empires as the new global center of gravity. Europe survived—but as a protected continent, trembling perpetually between American reassurance and Russian menace.
History, it seems, has an exquisite sense of irony.
The real question now is not whether America is declining—history rarely moves in straight lines—but whether others will learn from the moment. Africa, in particular, stands at a rare crossroads.
If African leaders are wise, this era of shifting power balances offers the continent its best opportunity since independence—not to shelter under China, America, Europe, or Russia, but to finally grow up geopolitically. Not loudly. Not defiantly. But deliberately.
By pulling together as an inseparable bloc. By investing quietly in education, industry, technology, and internal markets. By resisting the temptation to become anyone’s proxy, playground, or pity project.
If Africa can master patience and silent growth—two most underrated strategic assets—then perhaps, in another generation or two, it will throw open the curtains not as a “rising” continent, but as a fully formed one. Not begging for a seat at the table, but hosting the dinner.
And when that happens, Davos may look very different indeed.
Victor Anazonwu, a journalist, historian and author, is on the Editorial Board of The Renaissance Online Magazine. He writes from Lagos.
