Founded in 1963, the Munich Security Conference was first conceived as an instrument of dialogue to restore trust between Germany and the United States, before becoming a global platform for debates between heads of state on foreign policy and security. A look back at the most notable editions.

Published on: 02/13/2026 - 5:43 p.m. Modified on: 02/14/2026 - 10:38 a.m.

For Wolfgang Ischinger, president of the Munich Security Conference (MSC), which takes place from Friday February 13 to Sunday February 15, the international order is "being destroyed". This is the title of the report published by its foundation on February 9. Resolutely Atlanticist, Wolfgang Ischinger certainly did not expect, when he was German ambassador to Washington from 2001 to 2006, that the person who completed the destruction, 20 years later, of the international order inherited from the post-war period would be an American president.

For the organizer of this international forum devoted to cooperation and defense issues, the Trump administration is "the elephant in the room", which leaves Europeans with no other choice than to address head on the question of their autonomy in terms of security, energy, technology and finance.

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A divorce difficult to imagine at the time of the creation of the MSC in 1963. At the heart of the Cold War, its founder Ewald von Kleist (1922-2013), son of German resistance fighters against Nazism, sought to strengthen trust between Germany and the United States. During the first of 62 editions, around fifty guests, including Henry Kissinger, then a professor at Harvard, and Helmut Schmidt, MP for Hamburg, who would become chancellor from 1974 to 1982, discussed the challenges of global security, a few months after the Cuban missile crisis. Already, there is talk of the tensions shaking the transatlantic relationship. That same year, 1963, in the introduction to the United States' national security strategy, US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy singled out "NATO member states (who) are not paying their fair share and living in affluence".

Long a small annual gathering, the Munich Security Conference is primarily a loudspeaker for chancellors eager to display Germany's desire to play a more important role on the international scene. This is the case of Helmut Kohl (1982-1998) who, in 1996, following the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992-1995), underlined Germany's vocation to "play an active role in the consolidation of peace in Europe".

Sound box

The Munich Conference only truly became a sounding board for the upheavals of the world in February 2003, when the Secretary of Defense of the United States, Donald Rumsfeld, attacked France and Germany, which he described as "old Europe". While Washington does not appreciate that Paris and Berlin oppose the invasion of Iraq, Donald Rumsfeld insinuates that he has no other choice but to count on the new Europe, that of the Eastern countries, in particular the new members of NATO like Poland, which supports the United States. An outing as memorable as that of the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Joschka Fischer, who responded to him at the end of his speech: “Excuse me, I am not convinced.”

The enlargement of NATO to the countries of Eastern Europe is sure to come back on the table a few years later. At the 2007 conference, Vladimir Putin's speech marked the break between Russia and the Western world, announcing the wars that would follow – Georgia in 2008, then Ukraine in 2014 and 2022. "I think it is obvious that the NATO enlargement process has nothing to do with the modernization of the alliance itself or with security in Europe. On the contrary, it is a factor of serious provocation, which reduces the level of mutual trust And we have the legitimate right to ask, frankly, against whom this enlargement is carried out,” declares the Russian president.

At the time, few Western leaders understood the threat. On the contrary, the organizers of the Security Conference were over the moon when Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton exchanged on February 5, 2011 on the Munich platform the instruments of ratification of the New Start treaty on nuclear disarmament – the terms of this agreement which just expired on February 6 limited the number of deployed strategic nuclear launchers to 700 and the number to 1,550. of nuclear warheads deployed on these launchers.

"Davos with weapons"

Donald Trump's first term is already an opportunity for the Americans to multiply instructions to their European allies, ordered to spend more on their defense and to withdraw from the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement. "The truth is that many of our NATO allies still need to do more. And the United States expects each NATO member to put in place a credible plan to reach the threshold of 2% (of GDP devoted to defense efforts, Editor's note). By 2024, we expect all our allies to invest 20% of their defense spending in purchases," declared American Vice President Mike Pence in February 2019, at the grand rally in Munich, which diplomats are now accustomed to nicknamed "Davos with Guns".

Never has an American administration reprimanded its European allies to this extent. An admonition prefiguring a transatlantic rupture that Joe Biden's mandate is only delaying. In February 2021, the Democratic president affirmed in Munich that “America is back” in front of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Emmanuel Macron. Western leaders were significantly less enthusiastic when a year later, on February 17, 2022, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky warned them of the imminent Russian invasion: "We will protect our country, with or without the support of our partners. Whether it is hundreds of modern weapons or 5,000 helmets, we appreciate this support just as much, but everyone must understand that this is not some kind of gift that Ukraine should call back or beg.”

Russia's invasion of Ukraine five days later initially paralyzed the Europeans, who did not see global chaos looming on the horizon. During the February 2024 conference, J.D. Vance, then a senator from Ohio, warned them that if Donald Trump was re-elected president, the United States would stop supplying weapons to Ukraine and turn its back on Europe. His diatribe a year later, on the same platform in Munich, stunned Europeans. By attacking liberal Europe, guilty in his eyes of "not respecting freedom of expression" and of "allowing itself to be overwhelmed by immigration, at the risk of drowning its civilization", the American vice-president announces nothing more or less the rupture between the United States and Europe.

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The Europeans understand that they will have to invest massively in their defense budgets and that they will also have to agree on how to manage the transatlantic rupture and the end of the war in Ukraine, without it being to the detriment of kyiv. While that day, the director of the Munich Security Conference, Wolfgang Ischinger, could not help but cry, he who, all his life, fought to preserve this world order, which has maintained peace on the European continent since 1945, today wants to be lucid in the face of the new dynamics underway. A platform for debate, the Munich Conference intends to focus this year on developments in security in Europe and Asia, as well as changes in the areas of trade and development cooperation. With, therefore, an elephant in the room: the speech by American Secretary of State Marco Rubio, scheduled for Saturday February 14 and which is by far the most anticipated.

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