The Munich Security Conference is expected to be dominated by US President Donald Trump’s ambivalence toward traditional alliances, leaving Europe no choice but to step up its defense initiatives.
So much for basing scholarly foreign-policy debate on the international order. “The world is becoming less international and less orderly,” Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger, chairman of the Munich Security Conference, posits in his “conversation starter” report, which puts much of the blame for the chaos on the United States under Donald Trump.
Eminent US political scientist G. John Ikenberry is quoted as explaining this is not just by neglect, but by ominous design, even “sabotage.” “A hostile revisionist power has indeed arrived on the scene,” Ikenberry wrote, “but it sits in the Oval Office, the beating heart of the free world.”
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“The MSC report does feel like an anti-Trump report,” observed Ulrike Franke, a fellow with the European Council on Foreign Relations, who was present at the report’s Berlin launch. “There is an important emphasis on the liberal order, on the threats from climate change, on Brexit, on Russia — all topics on which President Trump has opinions that are very different from the writers of the report.”
The divide exists in the rest of the world too. Franke pointed to a graph in the MSC report, taken from a Pew Research Center survey, which showed plummeting international confidence in Trump’s ability to “do the right thing” in world affairs.
Trump ambivalence expedites European urgency
Weary proponents of a more self-sufficient Europe, however, say this has been a blessing in disguise. Trump’s incessant bullying of European leaders over the transatlantic gap in military capabilities and freeloading on US security guarantees is not different from administrations past — it’s just more extreme.
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