Again and again, in private conversations and in public forums, the globalists spoke of feeling besieged. Take the valedictory address of former President Bill Clinton, the paterfamilias of the globalist reunion. The Clinton Global Initiative is one of the major factors in helping to transform what had been a week centered on United Nations diplomacy into a broader Davos-on-the-Hudson for international aspirations.

Mr. Clinton spoke of the globalist vision of a “nonzero-sum” world in which everyone wins together and of how that idea was under attack by “zero-sum” tribal politics.

In a discussion Mr. Clinton moderated on shared prosperity, his four guests were esteemed globalists. The panel included Mauricio Macri, a former businessman who recently defeated Argentina’s entrenched populists to become president; Matteo Renzi, the Italian prime minister who styled his own career on the pro-market progressivism that Mr. Clinton called the “Third Way”; Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former Nigerian finance minister and World Bank official; and Sadiq Khan, the first Muslim mayor of London, who was a forceful advocate for Britain’s remaining in the European Union.

“Argentina has suffered decades of populism,” Mr. Clinton said in welcoming Mr. Macri. Mr. Clinton told Mr. Khan that he was “an example of positive interdependence.” But the panel’s insight was limited by the absence of anyone who could explain populist ire with authenticity — who could explain why, as Mr. Clinton put it, “the intensity of the feelings of people resisting our being pulled together outweighs the intensity of those who are winning from this.”

The advocates of a more densely enmeshed world seemed caught in a bind. Their project has long been to get people to enlarge the sphere of their worry, to look beyond national boundaries.