Trump at Davos: How Democracies Lose - and Recover - Their Minds

Why the Alliance Can’t Run on Courage—and What Cognitive Repair Looks Like

Part One – the Cognitive Republic response to the past week

What a week. I joked to a friend in a text last Tuesday (20th Jan) that we might be able to meet Friday (23rd Jan) assuming the zombie apocalypse hadn’t happened by then because of all the crazy swilling about the place.

Well, zombie apocalypse avoided, I suppose, at least for the moment. Trump backed off his plans to take Greenland, and I presume the idea that a NATO country would invade a NATO country is off the table for the moment. What a grotesque scenario.

Mark Carney’s remarks that the events of the past months signal a rupture, not a transition, feel on point. Tony Connelly of RTE News offers an excellent rundown of the week’s events here (Si apre in una nuova finestra).

The post-1945 order is sundering; America First means America tries to go it alone; allies are learning to treat integration itself as a vulnerability, because it can be weaponised against you (today brings the news that Trump is threatening a sovereign nation – Canada, its neighbour – for behaving as a sovereign nation, wanting to make trade deals with other partners (Canada can’t give in to such threats, and I assume won’t give in); the EU (+medium power allies) are talking openly about strategic autonomy in energy, minerals, finance, and supply chains. Febrile times, indeed.

What would a Cognitive Republic response be to the past week (and indeed months)?

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Now, we don’t have an actual Cognitive Republic (Si apre in una nuova finestra) anywhere yet – the idea that hardwired into our democratic operating systems and firm-wired into our everyday language, thinking, and background assumptions, that to survive and prosper, liberal democracies must reinvent themselves as learning systems, ones continuously experimenting, measuring, and adapting.

This means that from top-to-bottom, our democracies, need to redesigned around:

1. cognitive first principles (sensing/attention, learning, prediction, adaptation, measurement, falsifiability/correctability, and collective (institutional) memory) coupled to 

2. government-by-experimentation (policy trials, feedback loops, error-correction; institutions designed to learn across time (past/present/future);

3. with legitimacy derived and maintained through transparency, participation, and safeguards against capture.

To this way of thinking, democracy is not just a set of procedures, occasionally exercised (voting every so often, for example): it’s a collective cognitive system  - an adaptive learning and governance system. Votes and courts and political parties matter, but they’re not the end - they’re start. The world is complex, and the hard-won settlement of the past century - universal franchise, etc - is no longer enough.

What keeps the system alive is how we think together—pay attention, form beliefs, test them against reality, update, and remember what we have learned.

Modern liberal democracies are failing at that cognitive layer, and I argue this cognitive failure is central to everything else that is going wrong.

Some previous pieces here - they will be paywalled - consider joining the Cognitive Republic here. (Si apre in una nuova finestra)

Modern democracies are trying to govern a world of fast, deep, repeated shocks, of high complexity with institutions built for slower times and for reasonably predictability based on electorates that behave in predictable ways – they are not trying to govern for the times we find ourselves in.

And these are the results: short-termism, policy amnesia, crises all the time, allied to the default political demand—explicit or implicit—that citizens trust in whatever the political classes place before them: trust the strongman, trust the expert class, trust the party, trust the brand.

The authoritarian temptation and the technocratic temptation are now converging in the same place (as we discussed last time). It’s not good enough – and our current consensus is visibly failing us now.

The Cognitive Republic (Si apre in una nuova finestra) shifts the legitimacy bargain - legitimacy doesn’t come from demanding trust, or intermittent voting one lot out and the other lot in. Democracy gets legitimacy every day when people can see how decisions are made, what evidence is used on, what could change the decisions taken, and how and when the system will reverse course if it is wrong.

That requires treating citizens as something more than spectators.

Not full-time participants (an impossible attentional, cognitive, and behavioural burden), but by designing institutions respecting the constraints of real human cognition in the wild: bounded attention, finite time, cognitive load, identity threat, and the social pull of narratives.

A learning democracy is one that spends citizen attention carefully, doesn’t outsource meaning to outrage machines, and builds interfaces with clear measures, timelines, and decision points - allowing ordinary people to judge competence without needing to master every detail.

At the heart of the Cognitive Republic (Si apre in una nuova finestra) is a deep and profound commitment to explicit methods (see last time; this point will be developed further in future pieces (Si apre in una nuova finestra)). In science, you earn authority by stating claims in a way that can be empirically tested – that reality can refute. In engineering, you test, iterate, and redesign. In healthy organisations, you retain institutional memory and build routines that prevent repeating the same errors.

Start Here for the Cognitive Republic - Previous Pieces (Si apre in una nuova finestra)

A Cognitive Republic (Si apre in una nuova finestra) brings those norms into democratic life as the underpinning widely-shared philosophy: decision-making disciplined by priors, evidence, and direction correction, visible and transparent for all citizens to inspect.

In this way, our democracies become explicitly experimental in a particular and disciplined sense: trying policies at the right scale, measuring outcomes honestly, comparing ideas against alternatives, and continuous, active, adaptation. The promise is learning and adaptation the public can verify and trust.

Instead of pretending every policy is destiny, the system treats policy as a hypothesis, making reversals normal, rather than humiliating; error correction becomes a sign of competence rather than weakness. And it makes it harder for opportunists to weaponise inevitable imperfections into a case for authoritarian command.

Choose your membership (Si apre in una nuova finestra)

This is also a theory of collective democratic intelligence. Institutions are what brains do together over time: they store memory (law, precedent, practice), coordinate attention (what gets prioritised), and shape the narratives through which societies interpret events. When those cognitive functions degrade, governance degrades and people lose faith in those who govern us.

When those functions are strengthened, democracy gains a strategic advantage over authoritarianism: adaptation. Authoritarian systems can be fast, but they are epistemically brittle because they punish bad news and concentrate correction in narrow channels.

A Cognitive Republic (Si apre in una nuova finestra) distributes correction, makes it safer to surface reality, and builds competence by learning in the open.

The Cognitive Republic does not seek the chimera of a “perfectly informed public”, because it wants something more achievable and more powerful: a publicly intelligible learning regime—shared standards for evidence, explicit trade-offs, measurable commitments, and predictable correction when reality disagrees.

This way of doing democratic business transforms pluralism into an adaptive system: disagreement doesn’t disappear, because the method for handling disagreement—epistemic accuracy, testability, revision—becomes part of the social contract. In fact, good faith disagreement is desirable, as a stultifying consensus is epistemically dangerous, preventing novel information and thinking from being surfaced.

In a world of compounding shocks and unpredictable shifts, here’s the real dividing line: not left vs right, not even technocracy vs populism, but democratic systems that learn in public versus systems that demand belief. The Cognitive Republic (Si apre in una nuova finestra) is the bet that liberal democracy survives and outcompetes the alternatives by becoming the first kind of system - one that learns - an experimenting society whose legitimacy rests on accuracy, humility, and correction, all made visible at human scale.

Greenland/Davos episode

From a Cognitive Republic (Si apre in una nuova finestra) perspective, the Greenland/Davos episode on a human and standard political level is, of course, diplomatic melodrama (and for the Greenlanders, absolutely existential – Trump wants to kick over the Westphalian order, and simply ignore the usually accepted inviolability of borders, and just take their stuff).

But Greenland/Davos is also stress test of collective cognition under coercion: a powerful, unpredictable, bullying, impulsive leader using threats (of tariffs, of force) to compress time, scramble attention, and this forces improvised responses. The dangers are, firstly, giving into Trump’s demands (he’ll be back for more, and more), but secondly, you must ask what this tactic does to decision-making within the EU (+ its medium power allies): crises like these cause shortening of time horizons, cause forced rewarding in the form of flattery, and making “trust me” the only workable interface for dealing with him.

But trust is in short supply, and trust in the end isn’t enough; credible commitments are. Trust in Trump is gone, if we’re honest, to be replaced by a worried wariness. (Si apre in una nuova finestra)

The sequence: Trump revives his Greenland demands, then threaten tariffs and force, then “climbs down” after Davos and announces a vague “framework” with NATO, brokered largely through Mark Rutte’s shuttle diplomacy, with markets and unity of the EU (+ its medium power allies).

The point is not whether the crisis is “resolved.” The point is that the EU (+ its medium power allies)  just learned, again and publicly, that its direction of travel can be captured by attention shocks and deadline brinkmanship, and that it has the means to do something about this.

It just hasn’t thought them through yet. (Si apre in una nuova finestra)

A Cognitive Republic response to Trumpian tactics

A Cognitive Republic response has three parts: (1) protect attention, (2) harden correctability, (3) build anticipatory capacity—openly.

1.      Protect attention: treat coercion as an attack on the alliance’s cognition

The EU (+medium power allies) must stop treating these incidents as one-off personality dramas and start treating them as a recurring class of events: coercive attention hijacks. Trump’s aim is to monopolise the agenda, split the coalition, and force decisions before deliberation and verification can occur. Divide and conquer is the underlying tactic.

So, the first move is constitutional in the Cognitive Republic sense: allocate attention by rule, not by impulse. This means ahead of time creating a “coercion protocol” with pre-authorised lanes:

• a fast lane for de-escalation and military safety

• a verification lane for claims and motives

• a decision lane for proportional response.

This all sounds procedural, until you realise it’s an epistemic shield. A pre-agreed, pre-gamed, automatically-implemented and pre-committed protocol prevents improvisation from becoming policy, and allows anticipation and predictability of response - both sides will know what happens next.

The anti-coercion instrument is a good example of this kind of protocol - but the instrument had to be repurposed from its original intentions.

Scenario testing effectively means gaming out lots of different scenarios and possibilities. And realists - not nostalgics or idealists - realise all bets are off - the predictable world we have lived in is gone.

(Si apre in una nuova finestra)

2.      Harden correctability: make the EU (+medium power allies) response falsifiable, timed, and reversible

Connelly’s piece (Si apre in una nuova finestra) and the surrounding reporting show that Trump’s leverage depended on three things: the threat of imposing credible economic pain, the hope that the EU (+medium power allies) would fracture, and imposing early deadlines (e.g., tariffs from February 1).

A Cognitive Republic approach turns the EU (+medium power allies)/NATO response into something measurable and pre-committed, not vibes:

• Publish decision thresholds for instruments like the Anti-Coercion Instrument: what would trigger it, what would pause it, what would escalate it. (The EU (+medium power allies)  was already debating the ACI as the “bazooka”; the cognitive shift is to make its deployment rule-governed rather than performative.)

• Pre-declare reversal conditions: “If tariffs are withdrawn and negotiations proceed under X verification terms, response measures are suspended within Y days.” This removes the stigma of backing down and turns de-escalation into competence.

• Separate sovereignty from access with explicit contractual metrics. Much of the reporting turns on updating the long-standing 1951 US–Denmark defence arrangement and expanding practical Arctic security cooperation without conceding sovereignty. Make that distinction operational and publicly legible: “access increases by A, B, C; sovereignty unchanged; review every N months.”

• Develop the full suite of EU instruments for every possible scenario (and maybe do so via agreement with the medium power allies) - assume all bets are off, and this scenario will come around again and again (iow, don’t be complacent (Si apre in una nuova finestra)).

This is the Cognitive Republic strategy: saying “here are your commitments; these are our commitments, here are the tests to show we’re sticking both by them, and – so there is no surprise - here is the automatic response if things change – like you break your word and just walk away”.

And this is preferably said in public, so the commitment is obvious to one and all – thereby raising the stakes, and the seriousness of intent.

3.      Build anticipatory capacity: strategic autonomy as a learning programme, not a slogan

The Cognitive Republic contribution suggests that “strategic autonomy” becomes credible only when it is run as an experimenting society with public scorekeeping:

• Defence capability: treat the rebalancing of burden-sharing (which the NATO leadership is pushing) as a program with timelines, industrial-output constraints, and delivery metrics—not just spending targets.

• Cloud and compute dependence: if EU (+medium power allies)is structurally dependent on a small number of US cloud firms, don’t moralise about it—turn it into a staged portfolio: pilots, migration pathways, interoperability standards, and measurable reductions in single-point dependency over time. (Connelly flags this dependence as a strategic reality; the Cognitive Republic move is public, testable de-risking.)

• Critical minerals: Greenland’s strategic value is partly about Arctic routes and rare earths, but the rare earths are uninvestible (just like Venezuela’s oil). Canada is much more likely source of future minerals.

Citizen legitimisation matters, too: strategic autonomy will require trade-offs, spending, and time. A Cognitive Republic government earns consent by giving citizens full disclosure: what’s being built, by when, at what cost, and what failure would look like.

The meta-lesson: stop needing “Trump whisperers” as the core interface

Multiple accounts emphasise the role of Mark Rutte as an effective intermediary with Trump: flattery, careful brokerage, and attention. When you EU (+medium power allies) relies on charismatic mediation to prevent catastrophe, you are running a system whose stability depends too much on the personal.

The Cognitive Republic aim’s to de-personalise resilience:

• reduce the reward for brinkmanship by pre-committed responses

• make outcomes depend on verifiable conditions

• keep the EU’s attention anchored to long-horizon capability building

• publish what has been learned, and how it can be used in the future, so each episode increases institutional intelligence.

That’s the core strategy: turn these attempts at coercive attention grabs and coercion events into inputs for collective learning. If each crisis teaches the EU (+medium power allies) new playbooks (publicly stated, routinely tested, and periodically revised) then the authoritarian style loses its key advantage: forcing democracies to improvise on the fly.

What’s needed is less “more unity” (you already saw unity appear under threat), and instead new consensual norms: unity around method, pre-commitment, and public learning: so the EU (+medium power allies) stops depending on courage spikes and personality management when the next coercive shock lands.

So – what’s next? How do you make this stick? That’s the story for the next time. It’ll be paywalled -

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