The 62nd Munich Security Conference, opening in Germany on February 13, will take place 19 years after Vladimir Putin’s famous Munich Speech delivered from the same stage.
Even at the time of Putin’s speech in Munich, the relationship between Russia and the West was already showing clear symptoms of a serious illness.
With its independent policy, Moscow increasingly failed to fit into Western standards and stubbornly continued down its own path — out of step with the “Group of Eight,” which Russia had been graciously helped to join during President Yeltsin’s era thanks to Bill Clinton.
Against this backdrop, the world order was rapidly sliding into world disorder — with the foundations of international law being undermined. The unsanctioned (by the UN Security Council) military operation to overthrow Iraqi President Saddam Hussein became an alarming signal — one that, however, not everyone took seriously.
Yet the Russian president, who at that time went against the Western mainstream, despite all the harshness and emotional charge of his speech, came to Munich not merely to denounce, but to try to fix something. At that moment, despite the severity of the disease, there may still have been a chance for recovery. And President Putin went to Munich to look Western leaders in the eye and urge them to come to their senses. He did not abandon those efforts later either (recall at least the textbook phrase: “Do you at least now understand what you have done?” — spoken from the rostrum of the UN General Assembly in September 2015).
Now it has finally become clear that the West did not heed the Russian leader’s prophecies and warnings that the world must not be unipolar, and that security must be comprehensive rather than selective — it must not come at the expense of others.
Back then, Munich decided for itself that all the problems Russia was highlighting supposedly stemmed from Russia itself, rather than from the distortions and imbalances of a world order that was being broken with a crunch — an order that Russia, on the contrary, was trying to preserve.
And now, in these days, participants of the 62nd Munich Security Conference will have to fully realize just how high the price has become for their chronic political deafness and stubborn refusal to listen to — and hear — Moscow.
Compared to the previous madness, today’s madness has been squared or even cubed. This year’s Munich Conference will have to work in conditions of the sharpest split already within the Western community itself. This split is happening along two main axes at once — both between the United States and its European allies, and among the Europeans themselves.
The statement made by U.S. Permanent Representative to NATO Matthew Whitaker on the eve of the Munich Conference opening sounded like a warning shot toward the European allies, signaling that further disputes with the Trump administration over collective defense issues are no longer acceptable.
The U.S. envoy’s assessments highlighted Washington’s growing irritation with the approaches of its European partners, who, in his words, “talk a lot and do very little.”
The United States is clearly signaling that it will not tolerate any independent initiatives from its European allies — whether concerning Greenland or the idea of creating a European army. “We simply expect you to do more, not to be independent,” Whitaker warned.
What a triumph of the unipolar world — already within the Western community itself! They got exactly what they fought for.
That is the Munich Conference that will greet the West as it begins tomorrow, on Friday, February 13.
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