The Munich Security Conference 2026

Much hype, little substance, no hope

What an epic relief, it’s over. This year’s Munich Security Conference (MSC) has ended. In reality, the meeting has never had much to do with increasing anyone’s security. Otherwise, its Western participants would, for instance, not have laughed at but taken seriously the warning Russian President Vladimir Putin issued there as far back as 2007, which could have spared the world – and Ukraine – the current de facto war between the West and Russia via Ukraine.

Almost two decades ago now, while Russia was resurging from its post-Soviet time of troubles, the movers and shakers of the West chose to haughtily dismiss Moscow’s objections to the Western project of establishing a “unipolar world.” That was sheer hubris: such a world was never to be, but the obstinate Western attempt to impose it has proven highly destructive.

Which brings us to the present. This year the MSC has taken place under the odd motto “Under Destruction.” The phrase is both clumsy – the kind of sad things that happen when Germans try to sound original in English – and intriguingly pessimistic. Yet it could have had the advantage of signaling a growing willingness to face reality, in particular that of the West’s own mistakes over the last – roughly – third of a century. After the end of the original Cold War, the world has never been the West’s to remake, but the West did have a unique chance to improve it by practicing wise foresight (how hard was it to predict Russia would come back?), fairness (don’t kick a great power already down), and, last but not least, good faith (serial lying rots diplomacy from within - duh).