Simon Gros

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The recorded session stages Finnish President Alexander Stubb at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, as a a compact, highly mediated instance of public geopolitical reasoning in which a head of state and a policy-intellectual moderator attempt to render “order” thinkable under conditions of accelerated volatility. The central problem-space is articulated as a transition between historical equilibria: how to describe the present as an order-shift without either collapsing into fatalism or reverting to nostalgic institutional pieties. The event’s distinctive value lies in how it distributes justificatory labor across multiple registers at once—historical analogy, strategic diagnosis, institutional vocabulary, personal diplomatic craft, and audience-driven challenge—while repeatedly re-specifying what counts as realism, what counts as value, and what counts as agency. The recording offers an analyzable micro-architecture of definitional drift, rhetorical constraint, and institutional framing that exposes the tension between explanation and persuasion in contemporary transatlantic discourse.

What is immediately salient in the presentation is that the session begins in medias res: a question is already underway (“a lot of the headlines that we are reading”), and the first audible move by President Alexander Stubb is to compress the scene into a thesis-form. This opening compression is methodologically revealing. Instead of beginning with a descriptive inventory of events, he offers a historical typology of “moments” and places the present within it: “1918, 1945 or 1989” are invoked as names for systemic rebalancings of world order. The rhetorical force of the move depends on a double abstraction. First, it abstracts from the particularities of those years to their function as markers of postwar or post–Cold War settlement; second, it abstracts from contemporary multiplicity to a single process termed “change in the world order balance and dynamics.” The event thereby introduces its governing category—order—as something grasped through discontinuity, where discontinuity itself is narratable by analogy.

Yet the analogy is not left as ornament. Stubb immediately adds a quasi-empirical regularity: orders “usually last” a determinate span—he gives approximate durations after World War I, World War II, and the Cold War (about 20, 40, 30 years respectively). In the economy of justification internal to this event, this is an important warrant. It functions as a claim that order is neither purely normative aspiration nor purely spontaneous emergence; it has a temporal structure that can be reasoned about. The precision is limited and the modality is cautious (“usually,” “at least have in the past century”), but the claim installs a framework in which present instability can be read as the exhaustion of a cycle. The video thus shows a characteristic epistemic posture: the speaker offers temporal patterning as a bridge between historical narrative and strategic forecast, while keeping the bridge formally defeasible.

This initial architecture becomes more intricate when Stubb identifies an initiating cause for the “change in the current liberal world order”: “Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine,” dated explicitly to February 2022. Here the presentation exhibits a disciplined attribution of causal initiation to a single event, accompanied by a reflexive limitation: he acknowledges that this is “a rather western perspective” and that his identity lens is “Finnish, Nordic, European, transatlantic.” That reflexive disclaimer does not withdraw the claim; it relocates it. The claim is re-specified as situated analysis rather than universal narration. In philosophical terms, the event performs an epistemology of standpoint while retaining practical confidence. The standpoint is not treated as a weakness to be overcome through neutralization; it is treated as a condition of intelligibility that can be confessed and therefore managed. This confession, importantly, is framed as a feature of his book (The Triangle of Power: Rebalancing the New World Order), implying a prepared intellectual project that predates the session and provides conceptual resources that the live conversation can draw upon.

The moderator, Mark Leonard, is present in the video primarily as a catalyst for re-articulation. His first major intervention after Stubb’s framework is to characterize Stubb’s positioning as “against the tide of history”: liberal, multilateralist, Atlanticist in a world of anti-liberal movements, power politics, and changing meaning of “the West.” This is not merely evaluative commentary; it is a re-framing of the initial order-transition thesis into a problem of agency under adverse historical drift. Leonard’s question—how to reconcile the world one wants with the one one operates in—forces a transformation of Stubb’s discourse from macro-historical diagnosis into an ethic of practice. The discussion’s internal relation between segments is thus visible: the first segment produces an order-theory; the second segment demands a craft-theory for living inside the order-theory.

Stubb’s reply introduces “values-based realism” as an “instrument” rather than a doctrine. The definitional strategy here is carefully staged. He begins with a maxim: in foreign policy one must “deal with a world that exists,” a phrase that functions as a normative constraint on wishful thinking while also licensing compromise. He then defines values-based realism as remaining true to democracy, freedom, human rights, protection of minorities, rule of law, support for international order, while simultaneously accepting that one cannot solve conflicts, climate change, AI “only with like-minded countries.” The phrase “values-based” anchors normativity; “realism” anchors constraint; their combination attempts to domesticate the traditional opposition between moralism and power politics by converting it into an operational method.

The presentation shows that this conversion is not smooth; it is made plausible by narrative contingency. Stubb admits that when he crafted the concept, he did not anticipate needing to apply it “with the United States,” but now there is “an element of that.” This admission is pivotal. It retroactively re-specifies what the concept is for. A concept initially oriented toward engagement with adversaries or non-aligned states is now applied within the alliance, implying that the alliance itself has become a site of value-realist negotiation. The conceptual drift is therefore not incidental; it is the event’s enactment of its own thesis that “the meaning of the West” is changing. The West is no longer a stable locus of shared values; it becomes a terrain on which values must be instrumentally preserved.

Leonard’s interjection about Mark Carney and “rupture” reinforces this drift by introducing another vocabulary. Stubb accepts that Carney “might be right,” yet does not cede his own framing. He treats rupture as a possibility within a transition period that his instrument is designed to traverse. The word “instrument” matters: it implies temporality, use, and context-specific application. It also implies that the event’s discourse is methodologically self-conscious: the speaker is not only describing the world; he is describing the conceptual tools with which he proposes to describe and navigate it.

The next conceptual innovation—“dignified foreign policy”—emerges as a second instrument, linked to postcolonial memory and respect. Stubb frames this in terms of how “we always look back into history for examples on how we have been treated.” His proposal is simple in content yet complex in function: behave “in a respectable way” toward those one wants to work with. The complexity lies in the warrant he gives for his credibility: he comes from “a rather inoffensive country” with “a limited colonial past,” which gives him “street credit” to make the claim. This is a striking rhetorical move within an ostensibly neutral register. It introduces an implicit sociology of authority: certain states can speak about dignity and colonial memory without being heard as self-exculpating, because their historical profile grants them a relative legitimacy. The event thus reveals an awareness that in global discourse, who speaks is part of what is persuasive, and that persuasion is a constraint within diplomacy.

At this point the session turns to the Greenland crisis, which Leonard names as “the biggest transatlantic crisis… since… Suez.” Whether that comparison is accurate in an external historical sense is not the point the event makes internally; its internal point is to elevate Greenland from a topical distraction to a diagnostic lens for alliance dynamics. Stubb’s answer converts the episode into a lesson in unpredictability and procedural response. He lists a cascade of crises in the first 21 days of the year—Venezuela, Ukraine, Greenland, Iran, Gaza—explicitly marking the overload of attention. The list functions as an argument that foreign policy has shifted from linear agenda-setting to continuous triage. The term “curve balls” is colloquial, and its insertion is philosophically revealing: it implies that contingency is now experienced as a structural feature rather than an anomaly. The event thereby stages a phenomenology of governance in which the normal form of decision is reaction under time pressure.

When Stubb describes European responses to Greenland, he introduces a distinction between camps: those wanting to de-escalate, and those wanting to “escalate to deescalate.” He then admits that “most of us” operated in both spheres. This admission again refuses simple binaries. Even as he uses the phrase “fairly binary,” he converts it into a spectrum that requires mixed tactics. The discussion shows strategic reasoning as an oscillation between threat and restraint, where the legitimacy of threat is instrumental: threatening countermeasures is presented as a means of toning down language and finding an off-ramp. The Greenland episode is thus re-described as a controlled use of escalation within a diplomatic economy.

The three-scenario model—good, bad, ugly—functions as a practical rationality device. The “good” scenario is an off-ramp leading to a process strengthening Arctic security; “bad” is escalation in tariff wars; “ugly” is declaration of military intervention in Greenland. The categorization does not claim predictive certainty; it claims a structure for decision. It also implicitly orders values: military intervention is the extreme rupture; tariff escalation is serious yet bounded; security strengthening is constructive. Stubb then narrates the last “three to four days” of intense diplomacy with “Mark Rutte and Yuna Stur and American senators and others,” claiming that they “worked around the clock” and ended in “zone number one.” Within the discussion’s evidential economy, this is self-attestation; it asserts institutional action and outcome without presenting independent corroboration, and its function is to demonstrate that frenetic diplomacy plus credible countermeasures can yield a stable result.

Leonard reformulates this into a short-term lesson: a mix of seriousness, military filling of the vacuum, countermeasures, and “frenetic diplomacy.” Stubb’s assent—“work the phone… behind the scenes”—is a crystallization of the session’s recurring theme that legitimacy is partially procedural and partially relational. The public sees only declarations; the operative substance is in networks of trust and direct contact. Here the event’s rhetorical form modulates: it becomes less theoretical and more craft-oriented, yet the craft is presented as a method that instantiates the earlier concept of dignified policy. Working behind the scenes is not presented as secrecy for its own sake; it is presented as a necessary medium for de-escalation under conditions of potential humiliation. The event thus implicitly recognizes that public language can trap actors, while private language can preserve room for movement.

The conversation then turns toward European sovereignty and what Europeans “need to do” to be sovereign in the new world. Stubb’s answer is anchored in Finland’s specific institutional identity: Finland is “100% EU member” in the sense of being in the euro and having no derogations; the 1995 referendum decision is reinterpreted as security-motivated, though “we didn’t want to talk about it at the time.” This retrospective reinterpretation is another instance of temporal layering: decisions made under one declared rationale are later understood under another. The talk thus provides a case study in how political communities narrate their own institutional choices when historical conditions shift. Joining NATO is similarly narrated as something Finland should have done earlier, yet did in response to Russia’s attack on Ukraine. The event thereby integrates biography of a state into a theory of order: shifts in world order are lived as shifts in national self-description.

Stubb then offers advice: “don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater,” a folk formulation that signals a pragmatic conservatism about alliances. He lists prior transatlantic crises—Suez, France leaving NATO, elections in Germany influenced by placement of military equipment—using these as warrants that alliances survive turbulence. The function is to demote present crisis from apocalypse to recurrence, thereby making patience rational. Yet he does not deny novelty; he emphasizes movement in the partnership and the need to cooperate where possible (Ukraine, NATO, icebreakers, technology, minerals) while being “cognizant” and non-naive. The structure of the argument is a calibrated coexistence of cooperation and disagreement: some disagreements are declared publicly, others privately, and this is framed as a tactical choice rather than moral weakness.

At this juncture the talk becomes especially explicit about the stratification of diplomatic engagement: direct contact with the US president; “people close to Trump”; and the “first branch of government… Senate and Congress.” The interesting feature is the speaker’s refusal of illusion: he jokes about being a “Trump whisperer,” then immediately undermines the fantasy by saying he whispers or texts and “most of the time he doesn’t listen.” The humorous staging does not merely entertain; it does conceptual work. It punctures the personalization of geopolitics even as it acknowledges personal relations as crucial. The event thereby stabilizes a paradox: personal diplomacy matters, yet personal efficacy is limited; institutions matter, yet institutional commitments are unstable. The philosophical texture here is one of bounded agency.

The session then returns to Ukraine, and the moderator marks a transition: “before we all became experts on Greenland,” the biggest European security question was Ukraine. The narrative device is important: Greenland is treated as an attention-disruptor that can reorder agendas without dissolving underlying priorities. Leonard mentions that Steve Witkoff will fly from Davos to Moscow, and Stubb adds Jared Kushner. Whether these travel plans are factual outside the discussion is irrelevant to the internal analysis; within the event they function as signals that the peace process is active and high-level. Stubb’s response splits into “two remarks”: one on the peace process, one on the narrative of the war. This explicit structuring reveals a method: separate procedural negotiation content from interpretive war-story content, because each has distinct persuasive risks.

On the peace process, Stubb claims “careful optimism,” grounded in a sense that once Kushner entered, the process became “more concrete.” He references a “28 point plan” and then a sequence of post-G20 meetings in Geneva, Berlin, Paris: national security advisers narrowing to “20 points,” then European leaders plus Kushner and Witkoff exploring “common landing zones,” then a Berlin meeting on December 5 of the “coalition of the willing.” He concludes “we’re almost there,” with “five plus two documents” addressing the 20-point plan, security guarantees, prosperity plan, sequencing plan, and others. The exact institutional identity of these documents is not established in the recording; what matters is that he constructs an image of bureaucratic maturation: the process moves from many points to fewer points, from single plan to multiple supporting documents, from abstraction to sequencing. The practical rationality is procedural: progress is legible as document production and convergence of parties.

He then asserts that “Europe, Ukraine and the United States is on the same page.” The grammar of the phrase is less relevant than its performative function: it tries to stabilize alliance unity as a premise for negotiating with Russia. This leads directly into the second remark: the “narrative” that Ukraine is losing. Stubb rejects it and claims “information and intelligence” back him up; he labels it a “Russian narrative” floated in the US. The event here shows a key boundary-setting move: what counts as evidence is partly intelligence, which is inaccessible to the audience; yet it is invoked as an authoritative warrant. This is characteristic of state speech in security contexts: evidential authority is asserted while the evidence is withheld, and legitimacy is sought through the speaker’s institutional role.

Stubb then offers an alternative evaluation framework: assess Putin’s strategic aims and see whether they have been achieved. He lists aims: take over Ukraine and make it Russian; prevent NATO enlargement; avoid remilitarization of Europe. Each is claimed to have failed: Ukraine will become an EU member; Finland and Sweden joined NATO, doubling the NATO-Russia border; Europe is spending up to 5% of GDP on defense. He adds a broader claim about Russian projection of power: losses in Iran, Syria, Venezuela, and contrasts US ability to act in Venezuela in 12 hours with Russian failure in Ukraine. Within the conversation’s internal economy, this is an argument by comparative outcome: power is measured by effective achievement of aims, not by territorial marginal gains. The conceptual move is to redefine “winning” away from attritional progress toward strategic consequence.

The discussion then shifts into military quantification: Russian advancement is “less than a percentage point” of territory in two years; what was acquired largely came from 2014 to before full-scale war; December casualties for Russia are cited as “34,000 dead.” This numeric claim is powerful rhetorically, yet it also introduces epistemic vulnerability: numbers demand sourcing, and the video does not provide it. The event’s internal logic handles this vulnerability by embedding numbers within a larger rhetorical indictment: Russia claims to take Kupiansk and fails; the war is “slow war of attrition”; the cost is disproportionate. The numbers function as intensifiers and as anchors that mimic analytic precision. The philosophical interest is that quantification here is used to produce a moralized conclusion about rationality: “for what?” is the question that turns numbers into evaluation.

Stubb then asserts that it is “rubbish” that Russia continues the war to gain more territory; instead, Russia must continue because “this war is too big for Putin to fail.” The phrase “too big to fail” is a conceptual import from financial crisis discourse into geopolitical psychology. It re-specifies war as a regime-stability project. He adds economic claims: Russian economy “in shambles,” inability to pay soldiers, zero growth, end of reserves, high interest rates, double-digit inflation. The inferential link is clear within the recording: economic deterioration increases regime dependence on war continuation, increasing the risk of prolonged conflict. His “big worry” is that Putin cannot afford to end the war. The prescription follows: continue to support Ukraine and pressure Russia; this is “the only way” to get a deal. Again, the event’s structure is diagnosis-to-prescription, but the prescription is framed as necessity derived from an account of the adversary’s constraints.

Leonard then shifts the conversation to the future of the EU and the paradox of Ukraine’s accession: necessary for security, difficult politically. He credits Stubb’s academic work on differentiated integration and asks how to “square those two circles.” Stubb responds by calling it “nerdy” and referencing his PhD on “flexible integration,” “multi-speed and variable geometry.” He then offers a core thesis: “nothing unifies Europe more than pressure,” and now pressure comes from east and west. Enlargement becomes “strategic and existential” rather than “legalistic and juridical.” This is a crucial conceptual transformation. The EU is re-described from a legal order into a security actor whose constitutional development is driven by external coercion. The event here articulates a political theology of pressure: unity is not the product of shared ideals alone; it is produced by threat.

Stubb illustrates flexibility through examples: he does not differentiate EU membership from close work with the UK and Prime Minister Starmer, or with Norway and Iceland. The implication is that the EU’s functional perimeter exceeds its legal perimeter, and that integration can be operational without membership. Then he proposes a reversal of enlargement logic: instead of negotiating “35 chapters and 100,000 pages” (he pronounces something like “Akminate,” which context indicates is the acquis communautaire; this is one of the few places where a technical term is present implicitly), a country could be granted membership and then receive rights as chapters close. This is not presented as a settled proposal; it is a way “out for Ukraine.” The event’s internal argument is procedural innovation under existential constraint.

Stubb then introduces scale factors: Ukraine’s population (he says “over 40 million inhabitants,” and e claims Ukraine’s agriculture market is “bigger than all of Europe combined”. He then states Ukraine has “800,000 men and women in the military,” and that EU military power would double or triple overnight upon Ukraine’s accession. The function of these claims is to convert Ukraine from beneficiary to contributor: accession is reframed as security augmentation for the EU, countering fears of burden. He then enumerates absorption criteria: institutions, budget, policies. The conclusion is strong: excluding Ukraine would be a “travesty” and “strategic geopolitical mistake.” The event thus performs a normative stabilization: the complexity of accession is acknowledged, yet the direction is treated as obligatory.

A brief aside by Leonard about the UK—seven years to negotiate out, seven to regret, seven to negotiate back—functions as comic relief and as rhetorical tightening. It is an instance where irony modulates the meaning of a serious claim: Europe’s gravitational pull persists, and strategic pressure may reverse political exits. The event’s unity is maintained by such moments; they prevent the discourse from becoming purely technocratic, while still serving the argument.

The Q&A portion then changes the justificatory ecology. Audience questions force the speaker to re-articulate earlier concepts under moral scrutiny and under constraints of time. Leonard sets procedural rules—short questions, introduce yourself—and this itself is an institutional frame: the public sphere is managed, not free-flowing. The first questioner (“Comfort,” affiliated with Crisis Group) adds a lesson: it matters when someone from a western country recognizes “rupture,” because otherwise what “the rest of the world” says does not “land.” She pushes for practical meaning of dignified foreign policy in contexts of Sudan, Myanmar, Haiti, and mentions “variations of silence over Venezuela,” while reaffirming sovereignty and territorial integrity with the complication that not everyone supports Maduro. This question is structurally important: it forces the event to face the distribution of attention and the ethics of selectivity. It takes the speaker’s own list of crises and asks what the omissions mean.

Stubb’s response thanks Crisis Group reports and frames Sudan, Myanmar, Haiti as examples of what happens when attention is elsewhere—Venezuela, Ukraine, Greenland, Iran, Gaza. He calls Sudan “probably the most atrocious conflict” that has been “completely forgotten,” cites population “50–55 million,” half living in poverty, absence of human rights. Haiti is “same thing.” He then states he tries to deal with as many conflicts as possible, yet in foreign policy there are conflicts where he can “say” things based on values and conflicts where he can “do” things, as on Ukraine. He says he tries to “pick my battles.” This is a candid admission of limitation and prioritization. It is the event’s internal recognition that value-based realism must include a realism about capacity, attention, and influence.

The Venezuela part of his answer is particularly revealing because it re-enacts the tension between sovereignty and legitimacy. He says it is complicated: on one hand, breaking international law by removing a leader is impermissible; on the other, Maduro’s legitimacy is questioned. He concludes that in this case values-based realism is “a wonderful tool.” The philosophical significance is that values-based realism appears as a way to endure contradiction without resolving it. It permits one to hold sovereignty as a principle while also acknowledging regimes whose legitimacy is contested, and to treat the resultant indecision as method rather than failure. The presentation preserves the modality: he does not offer a clean policy answer; he offers a conceptual justification for why the answer is hard.

A subsequent question from a journalist from China asks about European strategic autonomy and worries that populism and isolationism could undermine unity and further integration. Leonard cuts off a follow-up due to time, indicating again how procedural constraints shape substance. Stubb answers “telegraphically”: pressure from the US and Russia will lead to deeper integration, more strategic autonomy, and an enlarged Europe. He adds that Europe will look elsewhere, “hedging” or “derisking.” He notes that Europe used to talk about de-risking from China, and he does not hear that “too much anymore,” implying a shift in comparative anxieties. He mentions a Mercosur deal, a free trade agreement with India, and refers to a European Parliament decision “yesterday” about Mercosur, while saying he will move along. Within the video, these references function as indicators that Europe is responding to geopolitical pressure by diversifying economic relations.

Here a bounded piece of contextual scaffolding is unavoidable for conceptual clarity: Mercosur is a South American trade bloc, frequently referenced in European trade discourse. That clarification does not add claims beyond what the discussion implies; it simply specifies the referent of the term so the internal argument is intelligible. Similarly, “de-risking” is used as a policy keyword meaning reducing dependency vulnerabilities in trade and supply chains. The event uses it as a metaphor of strategic diversification. These glosses remain subordinate to the presentation: the point is that Stubb’s optimism about Europe is partly economic and reputational. He argues that Europe, once seen as slow, bureaucratic, stable, is now attractive because stability has become scarce. Investment will come into Europe because people are “looking for stability.” The event therefore converts a long-criticized European trait into a geopolitical asset, demonstrating how evaluative predicates can invert under changing conditions.

The final audience question, from a 22-year-old Global Shapers member from New Delhi, asks about the utility of public versus private diplomacy and how Stubb developed skills to navigate. Stubb frames his answer with a triad: values, interests, power. Smaller players have values and interests; power becomes influence; diplomacy is the medium of influence. He then distinguishes two pillars of diplomacy: traditional state-to-state relations (formal, structured by geography, history, culture) and personal relations (leader-to-leader). The question then becomes a matter of judgment: what to say in public, what to handle in private. He analogizes this to family or friends and “trust.” He insists that private candor is not appeasement; it is respect and dignified foreign policy. He acknowledges that public arena is an important tool, citing the US president’s Truth Social as a powerful foreign policy instrument. He concludes that diplomacy happens in both spheres, and he suggests that studying the juncture is “super interesting.”

This closing segment retroactively disciplines earlier parts of the event. The Greenland story’s “frenetic diplomacy,” the stratified channels of contact with the US, the careful choice of public disagreement and private disagreement, and the very existence of a Davos panel where a president speaks in conceptual terms—all are re-specified as instances of the public-private mix. The event thereby achieves a kind of closure: it ends with method, not with policy. The “integrated system” of the session becomes clearer: order-theory leads to instrument-theory (values-based realism, dignified foreign policy), which leads to case applications (Greenland crisis management, EU sovereignty strategy, Ukraine process), which leads to ethical challenge (global south attention and neglected crises), which leads to meta-method (public/private diplomacy as a site of judgment). The unity is less the unity of a single thesis than the unity of a practice: how a contemporary European leader attempts to think publicly without surrendering the practical advantages of private negotiation.

Several internal tensions remain productive rather than resolved. One is the tension between the binary of multipolarity versus multilateralism and the repeated admission that outcomes land “somewhere in between,” and that actors operate in both de-escalatory and escalation-to-deescalate modes. The video shows the binary operating as a didactic simplification—useful for orienting an audience—while practice requires hybridization. Another tension is between universal norms (sovereignty, territorial integrity, rule of law) and the pragmatic engagement with contested legitimacy (Venezuela, the implicit issues of dealing with non-like-minded partners, the admission that values-based realism now applies even with the US). The event stabilizes this tension by making it a feature of method: realism is the capacity to endure norm-conflict without dissolving norm-commitment.

A further tension concerns evidence. Stubb oscillates between publicly accessible warrants (historical analogies, institutional facts about Finland’s EU membership, procedural narratives of meetings) and inaccessible warrants (intelligence claims, casualty numbers without sourcing). The session does not attempt to solve this tension; it relies on institutional authority and rhetorical moderation to maintain credibility. This is part of the event’s compositional frame: a Davos panel is a space where authority is performed through conceptual fluency and institutional position, without the evidentiary apparatus of a formal report. The presentation makes this legible because it repeatedly marks when claims are asserted as known (“we have enough information and intelligence”) and when claims are framed as interpretive (“I don’t buy that narrative,” “my big worry”).

The moderator’s role is equally structural. Leonard’s questions consistently force re-specification: from order-shift to lived practice, from Greenland drama to lessons, from European identity to sovereignty strategy, from Ukraine necessity to accession paradox, from conceptual dignity to practical application in neglected conflicts. He also manages time and cuts off follow-ups, shaping what becomes determinate. In the event’s internal economy, moderation is a form of epistemic governance: it decides which concepts must be clarified under pressure and which can remain suggestive.