DAVOS — For the citizens of Davos, Donald J. Trump is just one more VIP.

The residents and holidaymakers at the Swiss mountain town see the US president — who previously railed against the type of elites that traditionally attend the event — as another visitor at the World Economic Forum’s (WEF) annual meeting. Even if Mr. Trump weren’t coming, the town would still be going into security lockdown, rerouting local bus lines and seeing bars and hotels taken over by investment banks and global corporations.

While a group in Zurich, some 90 miles away, has launched a petition to stop Mr. Trump’s attendance, people in the town itself say the presence the man known for his fiery rhetoric and late-night barrages on Twitter is just as welcome as anyone else.

“He’s been elected, you can’t just ignore him,” said Jutta Schneidereit, speaking in the town on Wednesday, less than 24 hours after the White House said Mr. Trump would spread his “America First” agenda at the gathering.

But the 65 year-old retired lawyer from Germany — who’s been taking vacations in Davos for 35 years — also acknowledged his presence will make for an interesting meeting with, possibly, a mixture of tension and glitz.

“Other government officials will have to accept him with gritted teeth,” she said, adding that Mr. Trump will give this year’s forum “a certain cabaret effect.”

FORUM FOR DIALOG
Speaking to people around the town two weeks before the WEF starts — with the slogan “Creating a Shared Future in a Fractured World” — similar views emerged from most.

“He’s a business man, so he belongs at the event,” said Beatrice Camastral, 53, who works in a local store. “His manner is provocative, and that’s a bit tricky.”

The administration of the town of 12,600 people in eastern Switzerland says Mr. Trump, whose inauguration a year ago was met with protests around the US, will be welcome, as are all high-profile guests.

“Davos wants to be a platform for fostering dialog — the spirit of coming together even if there are differences to try to find a common solution,” said Michael Straub, Davos’ first secretary.

In previous years, the WEF has met with anti-capitalist protests, though a wide security ring has kept demonstrators far away from the conference center. For 23-year-old carpenter Marcel Wegmann, fighting his presence isn’t a sensible approach.

“Protesting would be a joke,” he said, sitting in a cafe with a friend. “He’s president, full stop. And it wouldn’t work, Trump doesn’t care, you’ve seen that.”

While the US President shouldn’t have problems finding Diet Coke, his beverage of choice, in the town, there’s no local McDonald’s outlet. The closest is 36 miles away in the region’s municipal capital.

Not to worry, said Josef Baggenstos, a 75-year-old Swiss pensioner speaking on Davos’ main street. “He’ll be in Chur quickly.” — Bloomberg

SEOUL — US President Donald J. Trump’s notoriously threatening rhetoric towards nuclear-armed North Korea — which has drawn comparisons with Richard Nixon’s “madman theory” of diplomacy — may deserve some credit for bringing Pyongyang to talks, analysts have said.

The two Koreas held their first official dialogue in more than two years this week, agreeing the North would send its athletes to next month’s Winter Olympics in the South and paving the way for further discussions.

The meeting represented a significant improvement after months of confrontation, during which Pyongyang carried out multiple missile tests and by far its biggest nuclear detonation to date.

At the same time Mr. Trump was blamed for heightening tensions with his threats to rain “fire and fury” on the North — now the title of an incendiary book on his presidency — and assertions that its leader Kim Jong-Un was on a “suicide mission.”

Since Mr. Kim inherited power in 2011, North Korea has made rapid progress towards its goal of developing a missile that can deliver an atomic warhead to the United States, which significantly strengthens its negotiating position.

In his New Year speech Mr. Kim said Pyongyang had accomplished “the great, historic cause of perfecting the national nuclear forces.”

But some analysts now say that despite the hermit state’s achievements and the defiance of its propaganda, Mr. Trump’s chest-thumping threats provoked real fears within the North’s elites, pushing them to seek ways to dial down tension.

Alexander Vorontsov, head of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences, was in Pyongyang for meetings towards the end of last year.

While there, he spoke to officials who “feared that the US was already trying to shape the battlefield for a military operation against the North,” he wrote Wednesday on the website 38North.

They seemed “truly baffled” that the South was unaware Mr. Trump was inching closer to war, Mr. Vorontsov said, while “Pyongyang, they maintained, is under no such illusions.”

Trump administration officials have repeatedly said that military action is an option on the table. Washington has held several joint exercises with allies South Korea and Japan this year, and deployed three aircraft carriers to the area at the same time.

There was “growing concern” in Pyongyang, Mr. Vorontsov said, that “different elements of a combined arms operation against North Korea are being methodically rehearsed and that ‘zero hour,’ as they put it, is not too far away.”

‘PROFESSIONAL WRESTLING MATCH’
The unpredictable US president is believed by some to be employing the playbook of his predecessor Richard Nixon, whose “madman theory” aimed to scare opponents into concessions by cultivating an image of recklessness.

It was Mr. Nixon himself who coined the term, according to his chief of staff H.R. Haldeman, whose autobiography quotes the disgraced president describing his intended message as: “We can’t restrain him when he is angry — and he has his hand on the nuclear button.”

At times, Mr. Trump has appeared to echo the approach wholeheartedly.

As his top diplomat sought an opening with Pyongyang in October, the president tweeted: “I told Rex Tillerson, our wonderful Secretary of State, that he is wasting his time trying to negotiate with Little Rocket Man” — his nickname for Kim.

“Save your energy Rex, we’ll do what needs to be done!” he added.

At the UN General Assembly he raised the prospect the US would “totally destroy” North Korea, prompting Mr. Kim to respond with a personal pledge to “surely and definitely tame the mentally deranged US dotard with fire.”

“Never before have two leaders in command of nuclear arsenals more closely evoked a professional wrestling match,” wrote a New Yorker columnist at the time.

Go Myong-Hyun, an analyst at the Asan Institute of Policy Studies, said US actions had “instilled considerable fear in Pyongyang unlike in South Korea.”

“So they came to talks to secure strategic space,” he said.

North Korea’s refusal to expand the agenda of Tuesday’s talks was intended to draw out the process “to avoid possible US military action,” Mr. Go added.

Despite a handful of agreements reached Tuesday, the North Korean delegation did not respond to Seoul’s proposal for talks on family reunions, and said its nuclear and missile programs — which it says it needs to defend itself — were not up for discussion with the South.

South Korean President Moon Jae-In on Wednesday thanked Mr. Trump for his efforts, saying he had played a “very big” role in realizing the talks.

But former US secretary of state John Kerry has described Mr. Trump’s tweets as creating “chaos politics” and many analysts say that in the long term, the US leader’s approach will be counterproductive.

The president had been “talking to the world’s most dangerous state like a petulant man-child,” Robert Kelly of Pusan National University wrote at the weekend.

“Honestly, Trump just made everything worse, and his rhetoric almost certainly convinced the Kimist elite that going for nukes was wise.”

The 45^th president of the United States, though, has no doubts where credit lies for getting the two Koreas together.

“We were the ones,” he told a cabinet meeting Wednesday. “Without our attitude, that would have never happened.” — AFP