Will we always have Munich?: the great event of world defense, with the known order “under destruction”

It has been a year since the US vice president, , delivered a , criticizing Europe as never before for its policies on migration and alleged limits on freedom of expression and stating that the greatest threat facing the continent comes from within, from its own .

The audience was visibly stunned. Since then, the White House has disrupted the world order. Both allies and enemies have been hit with punishing tariffs, it has carried out an incursion without legal sanction in Venezuela, it has undertaken the unequal search for peace in Ukraine on terms favorable to Moscow and it has even attacked its neighbor, Canada, saying that it should become the “51st state” of the United States. For him, everything is medals, as with Gaza.

This year, the German conference, which will focus the world’s attention from today and throughout the weekend, is once again shaping up to be decisive. And they will not be from Trump or Vance, although they will be 200 government representatives from 120 countries, including the president of the Spanish Government. The North American Secretary of State, , is the one who heads his country’s delegation, which sounds like contempt, at a time when security in Europe looks increasingly weaker, precisely because Washington gives him the slip, does not treat him as a partner, even dares to attack him, politically, defensively and commercially.

The latest, published late last year, urged Europe to “stand on its own two feet” and take “primary responsibility for its own defense,” raising fears that the White House is increasingly unwilling to back the old continent’s defense. That, without taking into account that this same Strategy encouraged the related extreme right, the one that wants to dynamite community structures from within.

But it is the -Denmark-EU-NATO crisis that has truly torn the fabric of the entire transatlantic alliance between the United States and Europe. Trump has declared on numerous occasions that he “needs to control” the island near the Arctic for the sake of American and global security, especially given the threat from Russia and China in the area, and for some time he has not even ruled out the use of force.

Greenland is an autonomous territory that belongs to the Kingdom of Denmark, so it was not surprising that the Prime Minister of this country, the social democrat Mette Frederiksen, said that a hostile military takeover by the United States, which has sustained the security of Europe for the last 77 years. The model that we gave ourselves after the Second World War, destroyed.

The Greenland crisis has been avoided for now: the White House has been distracted by other priorities, announcing a principle of agreement with the Atlantic Alliance and witnessing, pleased, how the European partners try to please it and activate the , to improve the shielding in that entire area. Despite this past swell, there remains a hangover, an uncomfortable question, pending at the Munich Conference: Are the security ties between Europe and the United States damaged beyond repair? We will have to listen and read between the lines, too, these days.

They remain, but…

For the moment, it can be said that these relations are maintained, although they are strained, distrustful, which leads Europe to a revolution: that of acting upon fully realizing that it can no longer depend on the United States in anything, neither in weapons nor in technology, nor in trade nor in diplomacy.

Sir Alex Younger, who was head of the United Kingdom’s Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, between 2014 and 2020, explains that while the transatlantic alliance will not go back to the way it was, it is not broken. “We continue to benefit greatly from our security, military and intelligence relationship with the United States,” he says. He also believes, like many, that Trump was right to force Europe to take greater responsibility for its own defense. “We have a continent of 500 million [Europa]and we ask a continent of 300 million [EEUU] that faces a continent of 140 million [Rusia]. It’s the other way around. “That’s why I think Europe should take greater responsibility for its own defense,” he said.

This imbalance, by which the American taxpayer has been effectively subsidizing Europe’s defense needs for decades, has underpinned much of the Trump White House’s resentment toward Europe.

But the divisions in the transatlantic alliance go far beyond the number of troops and the irritation towards those NATO countries, like Spain, that have not reached the agreed minimum of , which was what was agreed at the Alliance summit last summer. We have clashes over migration and freedom of expression, in which the Trump team has deep differences with Europe. And in trade, of course: we must not forget that precisely with a tariff agreement that Washington now wants to adjust even more.

Meanwhile, democratically elected European governments have been alarmed by Trump’s relationship with Russia’s president and his propensity to blame Ukraine for the Russian invasion. A story that the White House has bought, with public quarrels with the president of Ukraine, which have scandalized Brussels.

Weakness and questioning

Munich Security Conference organizers, research and policy director, say there has now been a fundamental break with American post-World War II strategy.

This strategy, he maintains, was largely based on three pillars: the belief in the benefits of multilateral institutions, economic integration, and the belief that democracy and human rights are not just values, but strategic assets.

“Under the Trump Administration,” says Bunde, “these three pillars have been weakened or openly questioned,” he assumes. “Under destruction” is, without room for doubt, the title of this dossier. The text says that the world has entered a phase of policies applied “with wrecking balls” instead of “careful and corrective reforms.” And he points directly to the Oval Office.

Trump is the most prominent example of those who promise to free their country from the shackles of the current international order to try to “build a stronger and more prosperous nation” at the cost of dynamiting the rules that the first world power drew from 1945. Anything goes.

The report predicts that the new world that the New York magnate wants to shape can benefit the richest and most privileged instead of the middle and lower classes who, “ironically, have placed their hopes” in this strategy.

It is noticeable even in the delegation sent to this annual meeting. Olaf Boehnke, an analyst at the consulting firm Rasmussen Global, believes that the fact that only Rubio attends constitutes a new gesture of disdain towards Europeans. “In recent years the vice president always came and participated and this year (…) only the secretary of state comes, without the secretary of war, and here we talk about defense and military affairs,” he points out in statements to EFE. Marcel Dirsus, from the Institute for Security at the University of Kiel, told the same agency “relations between Europe and the US have reached a point of crisis and no one knows what will happen” at this year’s edition of the MSC.

Wake-up call to Brussels

Much of the thinking of the Trump White House is found in the aforementioned National Security Strategy. The Washington-based , describes the document as “a truly painful and shocking wake-up call for Europe” and “a moment of profound divergence between Europe’s vision of itself and Trump’s vision of Europe.”

The strategy establishes as a priority a new policy of supporting groups hostile to the same European governments that are supposed to be allies of Washington. It promotes “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations” and asserts that European migration policies risk “erasure from civilization.”

However, the document maintains that “Europe remains strategically and culturally vital to the United States.” “The reaction of most of Europe to this National Security Strategy,” says CSIS, “will likely be the same shock that Vice President Vance experienced during his speech in Munich in February 2025.” Express quote that shows the relevance of this meeting.

“We are currently seeing the emergence of political actors who do not promise reforms or reparations,” adds Sophie Eisentraut of the Munich Security Conference, “but are very explicit in their desire to tear down existing institutions, and we call them the demolition men.”

Of particular concern is the wake-up call launched by Trump at the NATO Summit in The Hague (Netherlands) last summer, when he questioned the application of the . It is the point that stipulates that an attack on one country will be considered an attack on all.

From 1949 until a year ago, it was taken for granted that if the Soviet Union, or more recently Russia, invaded a NATO member state like Lithuania, the full force of the alliance, backed by American military might, would come to its aid. Although NATO officials have insisted that Article 5 is still very much in force, and the Republican himself, at the end of the summit, tried to show that nothing had changed, Trump’s unpredictability, added to the disdain his Administration feels for Europe, inevitably calls it into question. Again, let’s look at Greenland and everything becomes clear.

The same question can be applied, analysts warn, to a future, and still hypothetical, Russian intervention in the , which separates Belarus from the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad in the Baltic. Or to the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, administered by Norway, where Russia already has a colony in Barentsburg.

Given President Trump’s recent territorial ambitions, no one can predict with certainty how he will react. And that, at a time when Russia is waging a full-scale war against a European country in Ukraine, can lead to dangerous miscalculations. So this week’s Munich Security Conference should offer some answers about the direction of the transatlantic alliance. Another thing is that, like last year, Europeans don’t like them.