Munich Security Conference

Based on Wikipedia: Munich Security Conference

Five days before Russian tanks rolled into Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy stood at a podium in Munich and delivered a warning that would prove prophetic. "We don't have any firearms," he told the assembled world leaders. "And there's no security." The leaders listened politely, then returned to their hotel rooms at the Bayerischer Hof. Less than a week later, Europe faced its largest land war since 1945.

This is the strange power of the Munich Security Conference—a gathering that has no official authority, issues no binding resolutions, and produces no final communiqué, yet somehow manages to be the world's most consequential salon for national security. Every February, the ornate rooms of a nineteenth-century luxury hotel in Bavaria become the crossroads of global power.

Born from the Ashes of Resistance

The conference exists because of a remarkable act of conscience. In 1963, a German aristocrat named Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzin decided to bring together security experts and military leaders for informal dialogue. This was not an obvious career move for someone in postwar Germany. But von Kleist had credentials that commanded respect across the Atlantic divide.

He had tried to kill Hitler.

As a young officer in 1944, von Kleist volunteered for a suicide mission to assassinate the Nazi dictator by detonating explosives during a uniform presentation. The attack never happened—Hitler cancelled the demonstration. Von Kleist then joined the conspiracy led by Claus von Stauffenberg, the famous July 20th plot that came heartbreakingly close to success. When it failed, the Gestapo executed von Kleist's father. The son survived only because the chaos of Germany's collapse interrupted his trial.

This history mattered enormously. Here was a German who had risked everything to stop the war, now dedicating his life to ensuring such catastrophes never recurred. When he invited American and European security officials to Munich for quiet conversations, they came. That first meeting in 1963 had only about sixty participants. Among them were two young men who would shape the Cold War: Helmut Schmidt, future Chancellor of West Germany, and Henry Kissinger, future Secretary of State.

The Hotel Where Secrets Are Shared

The venue has never changed. The Hotel Bayerischer Hof sits on a plaza in central Munich, a palatial establishment that has hosted guests since 1841. Its chandeliers and wood-paneled rooms provide a setting both grand and intimate—perfect for the conference's peculiar purpose.

What happens in Munich is not negotiation. No treaties are signed here. No communiqués are issued. The conference is, officially, nothing more than a series of conversations. This is precisely what makes it valuable.

Diplomacy normally proceeds through formal channels, with every word scrutinized and every position hardened by the need to maintain national credibility. Munich offers something different: a place where a Russian foreign minister can share a drink with an American secretary of state, where defense officials can float ideas without committing their governments, where the real concerns behind official positions can be explored off the record.

The bilateral meetings matter as much as the speeches. At a typical conference, more than a thousand private conversations take place on the margins. A head of state might address the main hall in the morning, then spend the afternoon in back-to-back meetings with counterparts from a dozen countries. The hallways buzz with whispered negotiations while journalists crowd the lobby hoping for scraps.

How It Grew

Von Kleist ran the conference for thirty-five years, from 1963 until his retirement in 1998. During the Cold War, the gathering focused overwhelmingly on one question: how to prevent nuclear war between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—the American-led military alliance of Western democracies—and the Soviet Union. The participants were almost exclusively from NATO countries and their close partners.

The conference was cancelled only three times in its history. In 1965, a scheduling transition caused a gap. In 1991, the First Gulf War made international travel inadvisable. And in 1997, von Kleist's retirement created a brief interregnum before new leadership took over.

That new leader was Horst Teltschik, a German politician and business executive who had served as a close advisor to Chancellor Helmut Kohl during the reunification of Germany. Teltschik recognized that the end of the Cold War demanded a transformation. The conference that von Kleist had built for a bipolar world needed to adapt to a more complex reality.

Under Teltschik, the guest list expanded dramatically. Leaders from Central and Eastern Europe—the former Soviet satellite states now charting their own courses—received invitations for the first time. So did representatives from India, Japan, South Korea, and eventually the People's Republic of China. The Munich Security Conference was becoming truly global.

The Ischinger Era

In 2008, leadership passed to Wolfgang Ischinger, a career diplomat who had served as Germany's ambassador to both the United States and the United Kingdom. Ischinger would reshape the conference more fundamentally than anyone since its founding.

He began by professionalizing the organization. In 2011, he established the Munich Security Conference as a formal non-profit company. This provided legal structure and enabled serious fundraising. The budget grew from less than one million euros of government funding in 2008 to approximately ten million euros by 2022, most of it now coming from corporate sponsors rather than taxpayers.

The scale expanded accordingly. Where von Kleist's early conferences had sixty participants, Ischinger's gatherings drew hundreds. The 2017 conference—the largest to that point—hosted 680 participants, including thirty heads of state and government, sixty representatives of international organizations, sixty-five top business executives, and seven hundred accredited journalists.

Ischinger also created new formats. The annual Munich meeting remained the flagship event, but the organization began hosting smaller gatherings in other capitals. These "Core Group Meetings" allowed more focused discussions among select participants. Sessions were held in Washington in 2009, Moscow in 2010, and Beijing in 2011—a geographic distribution that illustrated both the conference's ambitions and its careful diplomatic balance.

In 2009, the conference established the Ewald von Kleist Award, honoring its founder by recognizing individuals who had made outstanding contributions to peace and conflict resolution. The first recipient was Henry Kissinger, who had attended that initial 1963 meeting as a young academic. The award ceremony has since become one of the conference's signature moments.

When History Interrupts

For all its informal status, the Munich Security Conference has witnessed moments of genuine historical significance.

In 2003, German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer used the platform to challenge American arguments for invading Iraq. Looking directly at Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Fischer declared: "Excuse me, I am not convinced." The moment crystallized the transatlantic rift over the war and became one of the most memorable exchanges in the conference's history.

Four years later, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered what would become known simply as "the 2007 Munich speech." In an address that shocked Western observers, Putin attacked American unilateralism, questioned the expansion of NATO, and warned that Russia would no longer accept being treated as a defeated power. Diplomats who were present describe the speech as a turning point—the moment when Russia's growing alienation from the Western order became unmistakable.

More constructive drama occurred in 2011. The conference had become prominent enough that Catherine Ashton, the European Union's foreign policy chief, chose it as the venue for a meeting of the Middle East Quartet—the diplomatic grouping of the EU, Russia, the United States, and the United Nations that attempted to mediate Israeli-Palestinian peace. More dramatically still, on the conference's sidelines, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and American Secretary of State Hillary Clinton exchanged the instruments of ratification for the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, formally bringing into force the most significant nuclear arms control agreement in decades.

The Return of Great Power Competition

The conference's recent history reads like a chronicle of deteriorating international order.

In 2015, the fifty-first conference focused heavily on the war in eastern Ukraine, which had erupted the previous year after Russia's annexation of Crimea. The discussions also addressed nuclear negotiations with Iran and the spreading refugee crisis that would soon destabilize European politics.

By 2016, the Islamic State—the terrorist organization that had seized vast territories in Iraq and Syria—dominated the agenda. The conference hall was filled with intelligence chiefs and defense ministers grappling with a threat that seemed to metastasize faster than anyone could contain it.

The 2020 conference carried a particular poignancy in retrospect. Joe Biden, then a private citizen after his vice presidency, addressed the gathering with a promise: "We will be back." He was speaking of American recommitment to multilateralism after the disruptions of the Trump administration. Within weeks, the COVID-19 pandemic would shut down international travel. Within two years, Biden would be president, and the world would face challenges far greater than anyone in that Munich ballroom had imagined.

The 2021 conference was held entirely online—the first and so far only virtual edition. From their respective capitals, Boris Johnson, Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, and the newly inaugurated President Biden addressed cameras instead of a live audience. Biden's message echoed his promise from the year before: "America is back."

Ukraine and the New World

The February 2022 conference will be remembered as long as the institution exists.

The motto that year was "Turning the Tide—Unlearning Helplessness." The organizers hoped to inspire renewed confidence in the ability of democracies to shape events. But the conference was overshadowed by something more immediate: American intelligence indicated that Russia was about to invade Ukraine.

Russia, notably, was not present. Moscow had declined its invitation, a break from decades of participation. Ukrainian President Zelenskyy was there, warning Western leaders that their policy of engagement with Russia amounted to appeasement. He reminded them of the 1994 Budapest Memorandum, in which Ukraine had surrendered the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees from Russia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Those guarantees, Zelenskyy made clear, had proven worthless.

United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres delivered a grim assessment: the world was in a more precarious security situation than during the Cold War. Vice President Kamala Harris warned that the United States was prepared to impose severe sanctions if Russia attacked.

Five days after the conference ended, Russian forces crossed the border.

Grappling with a Fractured World

The 2023 conference, the first under new chairman Christoph Heusgen—a German diplomat who had served as Angela Merkel's foreign policy advisor—operated under the theme "Re:Vision." The word carried double meaning. On one hand, it acknowledged the efforts of autocratic powers to revise the international order by force. On the other, it called for new shared visions of what that order should become.

Heusgen made a particular effort to include voices from what diplomats call the Global South—the developing nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America that have often felt marginalized in Western-dominated security discussions. The first panel discussion was dedicated specifically to this perspective. Among the participants were representatives from Ghana, Colombia, and other countries rarely centered in Munich conversations.

The 2024 conference, the sixtieth anniversary edition, took this inclusivity further. Of more than two hundred side events, a significant portion focused on climate change, food security, and other issues of particular concern to developing nations. The main program featured speakers from 109 countries, with over half being women and more than a quarter representing the Global South.

The motto was "Lose-Lose?"—a pointed question about whether the growing fragmentation of the international system was creating outcomes in which everyone suffers. The alternative, the conference suggested, was an inclusive reform of global institutions that could produce benefits for all.

What Munich Means

Critics have long questioned whether the Munich Security Conference accomplishes anything concrete. It has no formal authority. Its discussions are not binding. Its participants return home and often pursue policies that contradict the cooperative spirit of their Munich conversations.

But this critique misunderstands the conference's purpose. Munich is not meant to replace formal diplomacy; it is meant to enable it. The relationships built in the Bayerischer Hof's corridors can facilitate negotiations that would otherwise never begin. The frank exchanges that occur off the record can reveal flexibility that official positions obscure. The simple fact that adversaries occupy the same space, however briefly, maintains the possibility of dialogue even when relations are at their worst.

The conference also serves as a barometer. What happens in Munich often predicts what will happen in the world. Fischer's 2003 confrontation foreshadowed the transatlantic crisis over Iraq. Putin's 2007 speech anticipated Russia's increasing assertiveness. Zelenskyy's 2022 warnings proved tragically prescient. For those who know how to read it, Munich offers early signals of the storms to come.

In October 2024, the organization announced that Jens Stoltenberg, the former Secretary General of NATO, would assume chairmanship in 2025. His appointment signals the conference's continued centrality to Western security discussions—and perhaps its ongoing evolution as the world it monitors continues to change.

Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, the man who tried to kill Hitler and then spent his life trying to prevent the next catastrophe, died in 2013 at the age of ninety. By then, his small gathering of sixty security officials had grown into the world's most important forum for discussing war and peace. Whether it can help prevent the conflicts that now threaten—or at least help the world understand them—remains the open question that brings leaders back to Munich every February.