To the dismay of no one, the World Economic Forum held at the Swiss town of Davos comes to a close Friday — but before it does, Boris Johnson served up a farewell morsel for somebody who wasn’t on the invitation list. The former and not implausibly future British premier said of Vladimir Putin, “He’s not going to use nuclear weapons … he’s like the fat boy in Dickens, he wants to make our flesh creep.”

As the Telegraph reports, that is a reference to “The Pickwick Papers,” which presumably is not on Mr. Putin’s reading list these days. Mr. Johnson also said that Moscow’s employing nukes in Ukraine would backfire by terrifying the Russians and sending Mad Vlad into “a complete economic cryogenic paralysis.” Also, “stop worrying about Kremlinology,” he advised his audience at a Davos breakfast.

Never one to miss an international parley of painfully dubious utility, the European Commission head, Ursula von der Leyen, was on hand in prim Switzerland to urge leaders to, among other things, “avoid disruptions in transatlantic trade and investment.” With America’s sweeping Inflation Reduction Act and its $369 billion green subsidy package in mind, Ms. von der Leyen said that “we should work towards ensuring that our respective incentive programs are fair and mutually reinforcing.”

With diamond-cut language like that, it’s little wonder that the Spectator included the peripatetic German in a feature on “How to Fail Upwards,” noting that as one of the longest serving of Angela Merkel’s ministers, Ms. von der Leyen “ran the German army so badly that its soldiers arrived at a training exercise with broomsticks rather than rifles.”

Greece’s unflappable prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis, was also at Davos, where he tried to flip diplomatically the script in respect of the Turkish president’s increasingly hostile comments directed at Athens. “I ask, does anybody reasonably believe that the Greek islands are a threat to the Turkish mainland, or is it more realistic to believe that the Turkish mainland is a threat to the Greek islands?” Mr. Mitsotakis wondered aloud.

In the days to come, count on Team Erdogan to twist those words to impugn — falsely — Greece’s defense posture on the Greek islands in the eastern Aegean Sea near the Turkish coast. In the meantime, President Erdogan is channeling his boundless fount of rage against the Economist, whose cover story this week is about “Turkey’s Looming Dictatorship.” The cover features a silhouette of Mr. Erdogan’s profile etched into the crescent moon that figures on the mostly red Turkish flag. Greek newspapers eagerly reported on the indignation the story engendered at Ankara. 

Mr. Erdogan’s communications director, Fahrettin Altun, said via social media: “I am convinced the Economist will never bother to report on what is actually going on in Türkiye” and that “this is largely due to their inexplicable and ongoing hatred against our democratically elected President, who has won every election he has entered.”

Mr. Altun neglected to mention how ahead of national elections in the spring, Mr. Erdogan has done his best to put a potential kingmaker out of commission and tried to jail a leading political opponent, Istanbul’s popular mayor, Ekrem Imamoglou.

Remember the Muslim Brotherhood? Le Figaro does. There is currently blanket coverage of the strikes in France, as hundreds of thousands of French take to the streets to protest President Macron’s plans for pension reform. Other socio-political issues percolate, and Le Figaro is apparently the first paper in France to publish extracts of a new book called “The Brotherhood and Its Networks.” 

The book, by French anthropologist Florence Bergeaud-Blackler, shows how the “most secretive” Islamic network “has succeeded in making the European Union the forward base for their project to conquer the world.”

That assessment dovetails with an opinion piece in the pan-Arab newspaper Asharq al-Awsat under the headline, “Will the Taliban Turn Afghanistan into a Base for Muslim Brotherhood?” According to writer Camelia Entekhabifard, a recent trip made by Muslim Brotherhood leaders to Afghanistan and their “many meetings with Taliban leaders in Kandahar and Kabul” show that the two groups intend to turn the country into a “staging ground” from which to threaten other countries.

Ms. Entekhabifard makes the claim that “the Muslim Brotherhood aims to encourage the Afghan group to retreat from its decisions to ban women from education and work” as a Trojan horse to better “organize under the shadow of Taliban rule to reach its goals.” Those goals include the imposition of political Islam by any means, including “threats and violence.”

In other publishing news, “Never Given an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love,” by America’s former top diplomat and CIA director, Mike Pompeo, is already making a splash overseas. The Guardian obtained a copy of  the book in which Mr. Pompeo claimed that Nikki Haley had eyed the position of vice president even while serving as President Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, and that she arranged a meeting with Mr. Trump in the company of Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner to discuss that possibility. Ms. Haley disputed Mr. Pompeo’s claims as gossip.

The unfolding “drama” that Ms. Haley told Fox News was “exactly why I stayed out of DC as much as possible” proved to be irresistible to certain pundits on the left, such as Ben Rhodes, a MSNBC contributor. “Pompeo and Haley poised for a real battle to see who can crack 1 percent in a Republican primary,” Mr. Rhodes, also a former speechwriter for President Obama, sniveled on social media. Davos material, that — but also, maybe not.