“In the past, we could rely on the French, the British and, especially, the Americans, to assert our interests in the world. We have always criticized the US for being the global police, and it was often appropriate to do so. But we are now seeing what happens when the US pulls back. There is no such thing as a vacuum in international politics.

If the US leaves the room, other powers immediately walk in. In Syria, it's Russia and Iran. In trade policy, it's China. These examples show that, ultimately, we are no longer achieving either, neither the dissemination of our European values nor the advancement of our interests.”

Our parents and grandparents built an incredibly prosperous and peaceful country. One shouldn't, of course, play down the degree to which this is dependent on our economic strength. The truth is that Moscow, Beijing and Washington have one thing in common: They don't value the European Union at all. They disregard it.

According to a May 2016 study by Israel’s Central Bureau of Statistics, in 2015, 63% of Jerusalem’s 870,000 residents were Jewish or members of other non-Arab demographic groups, compared to 37% of the population which identified as Arab.

Among the city’s non-Arab residents, 32% identified as haredi, 17% identified as religious, 13% as traditional-religious, 15% as traditional but not strictly religious, 21% as secular, and 2% as other or not Jewish. In 2015, a total of 62% of the city’s non-Arab residents identified as religious – amounting to just under 40% of the city’s total population of 870,000.

Politically, new and divisive narratives are transforming governance. Economically, policies are being formulated to preserve the benefits of global integration while limiting shared obligations such as sustainable development, inclusive growth and managing the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Socially, citizens yearn for responsive leadership; yet, a collective purpose remains elusive despite ever-expanding social networks. All the while, the social contract between states and their citizens continues to erode.

The 48th World Economic Forum Annual Meeting therefore aims to rededicate leaders from all walks of life to developing a shared narrative to improve the state of the world. The programme, initiatives and projects of the meeting are focused on Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World.

By coming together at the start of the year, we can shape the future by joining this unparalleled global effort in co-design, co-creation and collaboration. The programme’s depth and breadth make it a true summit of summits.

Perhaps the biggest single issue looking ahead is President Trump's hints that he might revert to his previous more confrontational approach to trade relations with China. During the election campaign Mr Trump spoke aggressively on trade, about US agreements and about some of the country's trading partners. He made an early start on his agenda after taking office.

One of his first acts was to withdraw the US from a trade agreement that had not come into force, the Trans-Pacific Partnership. He has started the renegotiation of another, the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta) with Canada and Mexico that took effect in 1994, although he has so far stopped short of earlier threats to pull out of it altogether. Another proposed agreement that was under negotiation between the US and the European Union has gone into the deep freeze, perhaps permanently.

He also has serious doubts about the World Trade Organization. The United States' lack of enthusiasm was a central factor behind a lacklustre outcome at the WTO's conference in December. It ended without new deals or even the usual agreed declaration of commitment to the system that the WTO manages.

Relations with the US under President Donald Trump have gone from bad to worse; those with Turkey have come close to breaking down altogether; those with central Europe are stretched thin. The shock therapy inflicted on the Greeks in 2015 at Germany’s instigation gave Latin countries a chilling glimpse of the fate awaiting those who refuse austerity. And the UK vote for Brexit in June 2016 deprived Chancellor Angela Merkel of a European ally in favour of free trade.

Some of Germany’s key economic allies have become political, ideological and cultural adversaries. The US, German industry’s biggest export market, is challenging Germany’s commercialism and social choices more and more openly. The countries of central and eastern Europe – the biggest providers of subcontracted labour to German industry, with a little-known role in its success – are rebelling against the policies Germany imposes, especially on migration.

Gideon Rachman noted in the Financial Times on 7 March 2017: ‘The situation threatens to revive an old German nightmare: the fear of being a large, isolated power at the centre of Europe.’

In September of last year, Dimon not only came out swinging against bitcoin, but he threatened to fire all bank employees who dared to trade in bitcoin — for being “stupid.” If a JPMorgan trader began trading in bitcoin, he said, “I’d fire them in a second. For two reasons: It’s against our rules, and they’re stupid. And both are dangerous.” The cryptocurrency “won’t end well,” he told an investor conference in New York, as Bloomberg noted, predicting it will eventually blow up. “It’s a fraud” and “worse than tulip bulbs.”

In the interview on Tuesday, however, the megabank mogul expressed his change of heart. As FOX Business reported, Dimon regrets past comments in which he called Bitcoin a fraud at that September banking conference. “The blockchain is real. You can have crypto yen and dollars and stuff like that. ICO’s you have to look at individually,” Dimon said in an exclusive interview with FOX Business.

The tweet came in the form of a video, which starts out with a clip of then-President Bill Clinton announcing a 1994 deal with the North Korean regime that was meant to halt their nuclear weapons program in exchange for aid from the United States. “This is a good deal for the United States,” Clinton says in the clip. “North Korea will freeze and then dismantle its nuclear program.”

The former president added that South Korea and other allies of the US would be better protected because of the deal, and that “the entire world will be safer” as the world’s arsenal of nuclear weapons is decreased.

Next is a clip of Donald Trump from 18 years ago, where he says during an interview on Meet the Press, “The biggest problem this world has is nuclear proliferation. And we have a country out there, North Korea, which is sort of whacko… and they are going out and they are developing nuclear weapons.”

Trump then posed the following question regarding taking military action against North Korea: “Do you want to do it in five years when they have warheads all over the place, every one of them pointing to New York City, to Washington… ?” He concludes by stating that it’s “better to do it now” rather than to wait for the North Korean regime to grow stronger.

If you fast-forward to today, then it becomes obvious that the warning Trump issued in that interview on Meet the Press was almost prophetic. We haven’t dealt with North Korea properly, and as a result, the regime now has nuclear missiles that they can use against the United States and our allies.

If people didn’t listen to Donald Trump 18 years ago, then perhaps now, with North Korea developing ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States, they will start to do just that. Indeed, when it comes to Kim Jong-Un and his regime, military action is starting to become not just a possibility, but a necessity.

Iran, he said, is dangerous because it is “trying to establish an empire, a territorial empire from Tehran to Tartus in the Mediterranean, enveloping the Middle East also from the south through Yemen, eventually conquering the Middle East. This is what Iran is about.” He continued: “We are absolutely committed to preventing Iran from forming such a base, a military base in Syria, and we back our words with action.”

Israel has no interest in a direct confrontation with Iranian forces in Iran, but has shown that it is willing to take action against efforts by Iran to either transfer game-changing weapons to Hezbollah or building the infrastructure in Syria or Lebanon to build that type of weaponry there.

A smattering of Iranian soldiers and advisors in Syria, along with tens of thousands of members of Shiite militias, is a considerable security challenge for Jerusalem, but pales in comparison with the introduction of precision-guided missiles in the hands of Hezbollah. Iranian tanks, and even planes in Syria, is something that Israel could deal with easier than weaponry defined as tipping the strategic balance. 

According to the Left, “hate” is any criticism of gays, lesbians, transgenders, black people, abortion clinics, Muslims and so on. No thoughtful criticism of such “protected” subjects is allowed, since it’s all deemed to be “hate.”

Left-wing truthism: White people are “dangerous” to everyone:

This targeted hatred of the Left is openly repeated across the left-wing news media, Hollywood movies, universities and other outlets. As just one example, an MSNBC panelist recently declared that white men “pose the biggest threat to Americans,” insisting that merely being white makes a person a danger to society. (She apparently has no familiarity with the work of MLK Jr. who correctly declared that judging people by the color of their skin is shallow and stupid.)

Yet at the same time, the Left openly encourages and practices its own hatred against a wide range of targets which are automatically deemed to be “okay to hate.” These targets include:

White people (“white privilege”)

Men (“toxic masculinity”)

Christians

Soldiers and veterans

Police officers

President Trump, Sarah Palin, Ann Coulter and other conservatives

Heterosexuals

America’s founders

Thus, the Left isn’t actually opposed to hate. They fully support hate as long as it’s directed to specific political enemies.

The evidence for this goes beyond the carping of Luddites. It’s there, cold and hard, in a growing body of research by psychiatrists, neuroscientists, marketers and public health experts. What these people say – and what their research shows – is that smartphones are causing real damage to our minds and relationships, measurable in seconds shaved off the average attention span, reduced brain power, declines in work-life balance and hours less of family time.

They have impaired our ability to remember. They make it more difficult to daydream and think creatively. They make us more vulnerable to anxiety. They make parents ignore their children. And they are addictive, if not in the contested clinical sense then for all intents and purposes.

Now, some of the early executives of these tech firms look on their success as tainted. “I feel tremendous guilt,” said Chamath Palihapitiya, former vice-president of user growth at Facebook, in a public talk in November. “I think we all knew in the back of our minds… something bad could happen. The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works,” he went on gravely, before a hushed audience at Stanford business school. “It is eroding the core foundations of how people behave.”