Munich prepares for the argument about security: the alliance’s renegotiation

The Munich Security Conference opened its annual edition in the second week of February, and the conference’s theme, chosen months in advance by the organizers, had been overtaken by the events of the week: the negotiations over the war in Europe, the new American administration’s redefinition of the alliance, and the European capitals’ scramble to understand what the redefinition means for their own defence. The conference is the annual gathering where the security order is discussed; this year, the order itself was the question, and the question was being answered, in real time, by the events that the delegates had come to discuss.

The war in Europe dominated the conference’s panels, as it has dominated every such gathering for three years, and the domination this year had a new character. The previous editions had debated the conduct of the war, the aid, the sanctions, the strategy; the 2025 edition debated the shape of the peace, with the negotiations announced in the same week providing the backdrop for every session. The Ukrainian delegation attended with the particular burden of the party whose territory is the subject, and the European delegates listened with the particular alertness of the parties whose security is the price. The conference’s most-quoted line of the opening day was the warning that the peace being negotiated would be judged by the security it left behind, and the line was quoted because it expressed the fear that the room could not otherwise name.

The American delegation’s message to the conference was the part that the European coverage analysed with the greatest care. The new administration’s representatives delivered the doctrine that the campaign had promised, the burden-sharing, the transactional alliances, the requirement that the European allies pay for their own defence, and the delivery was notable for what it did not contain: the reassurances about the treaties and the guarantees that the previous administrations had provided as a matter of course. The Europeans listened, and the listening was itself the story, because the Europeans have spent the years since the war began preparing for the moment when the reassurances would no longer be automatic, and the moment, by the evidence of the week, had arrived.

The European response to the message was the standard mixture of the defiant and the calculating. The leaders who spoke insisted, in the language that the conferences have perfected, that the continent’s security would be its own responsibility, that the defence budgets would rise, that the capability gaps would be closed; the numbers attached to the promises, the officials in the corridors noted, were the measure of the distance between the speeches and the spending. The defence industry’s representatives moved through the conference with the particular energy of the sector whose order books the war has filled, and the energy was the honest face of the European rearmament that the speeches were describing.

The conference closed with the recognition, expressed in the final panels, that the security order that the post-war era had built is being renegotiated in the open, and that the renegotiation is the work of years rather than weeks. The Munich conference’s value has always been the forcing of the argument, the bringing of the positions into the same room, and the 2025 edition forced the argument that the year had been building since January: the alliance that guaranteed the peace is no longer guaranteed, the continent that depended on it is learning to depend on itself, and the learning is expensive, uncertain and underway. The delegates returned to their capitals carrying the conference’s central finding, which was not a plan but a mood, the mood of an order in transition, and the transition was the conference’s real theme, whatever the programme said.