Security Situation: Do You Feel Safe?
Munich Security Conference 2026
In American presidential campaigns the question that candidates ask voters is, “Are you better off today, than you were four years ago?”
In Trump MkII, the question becomes, “Are you safer today than you were four years ago?”
My personal answer is, No. Not just because the single greatest crisis in the world — America’s continued descent into an anti-democratic morass continues unabated — but its a knock on effect in managing international affairs via diplomacy rather than the uncertainties of war.
The latter point was underlined by Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech at the Munich Security Conference. Among those listening were the foreign secretaries of most EU nations.
The headline out of the event was European leaders were re-assured following last year’s belligerent address at the same forum by Vice-President J. D. Vance
But there was less re-assurance on offer than many in attendance might have thought. Think of the Rubio/Vance speeches as a good cop/bad cop routine or, more apt considering the setting, an interrogation of a political prisoner in the basement of Munich’s Wittelsbacher Palais circa 1933-1944.
A year ago, Vice-President J.D. Vance delivered savage blows about the head and groin to the assembled prisoners, I mean Foreign Secretaries, who were then returned to their cells to recover their wits, mull what had happened and their sudden fall from favor. This weekend they were dragged back upstairs to find the calmer, more rational-seeming Rubio leading the interrogation.
But the message was the same: the MAGA way or the Highway. Rubio made clear this means accepting the MAGA version of history, after the Cold War’s end:
We embraced a dogmatic vision of free and unfettered trade, even as some nations protected their economies and subsidized their companies, to systematically undercut ours, shuttering our plants, resulting in large parts of our societies being de-industrialized …
(ed. note: The term Rust Belt came into common use in the early 1980s in America when the Cold War was still in full-swing and seemed set to go on in perpetuity. De-industrialization was the inevitable consequence of the Oil Shock of 1973 and the Great Inflation which followed, combined with improved automation tools in factories making human workers redundant.)
We increasingly outsourced our sovereignty to international institutions while many nations invested in massive welfare states at the cost of maintaining the ability to defend themselves.
(Ed. note: Sovereignty over foreign and defense policy, the key government areas related to sovereignty, have never been outsourced. The US has always been free to make whatever wars it wanted. So have any of the former great powers that had empires: Britain, France, Russia. All of these countries have availed themselves of this freedom)
To appease a climate cult, we have imposed energy policies on ourselves that are impoverishing our people, even as our competitors exploit oil and coal and natural gas and anything else not just to power their economies, but to use as leverage against our own.
(Ed. note: … nah, I don’t want to get side-tracked by climate change this week)
Rubio then shifted into a call to embrace the MAGA way to renewal:
For the United States and Europe, we belong together.
America was founded 250 years ago, but the roots began here on this continent long before. The men who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.
There was a lot of MAGA rhetoric about Christian civilization and Rubio traced his family roots in Europe back 250 years (avoiding any mention of how his family came to be in Cuba until 1956: Yanqui sí!, Latino mí? Non!)
But as in all good interrogations Rubio comes to the moment where he offers up the hope of salvation to the prisoner (s):
President Trump demands seriousness and reciprocity from our friends here in Europe. The reason why, my friends, is because we care deeply. We care deeply about your future and ours.
(Screenwriter’s direction: The interrogator walks around the chair where Winston Smith is sitting, we see him place a gentle but firm hand on Winston’s shoulder, the prisoner’s bruised face and body slump in relief as he realizes he will not be given the 9mm solution.)
What we want is a reinvigorated alliance that recognizes that what has ailed our societies is not just a set of bad policies, but a malaise of hopelessness and complacency. An alliance that we want is one that is not paralyzed into inaction by fear. Fear of climate change, fear of war, fear of technology.
…
Yesterday is over, the future is inevitable, and our destiny together awaits.
The response as summarized on Twitter (larger circulation than The Washington Post)
The assembled officials and their think tank brains rose to applaud, already forgetting that Rubio skipped a meeting on Ukraine while in Munich which rendered it useless. He then headed to Budapest for one to one meetings with Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Órban and then on to Bratislava for talks with Slovakia’s PM Robert Fico — the two European leaders who are full MAGA despite their countries being in the EU and receiving more in funding from Brussels than they pay in.
In a speech delivered the day before Rubio’s, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz took up the theme that Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney first broached at Davos a few weeks ago.
The international order based on rights and rules is currently being destroyed. But I’m afraid we have to put it in even harsher terms. This order, as flawed as it has been even in its heyday, no longer exists.
America’s European allies must look to their own resources to navigate this new era
Our military, political, economic and technological potential is enormous. But we are still far from exploiting it to the extent necessary.
The most important thing now is that we need to flip the switch in our minds. We have understood that in the era of great powers, our freedom is no longer simply a given. It is under threat.
It was possible to interpret Merz seeing the threat being as much from the US as any other country.
Among the journalists attending the conference was the Financial Times’ Ed Luce. Earlier in the week he had written a column about MAGA loathing London.
The myth of London as a third-world sinkhole is now central to Maga politics. Restoring Britain’s allegedly vanishing character is also an official goal of Donald Trump’s foreign policy.
Luce, who is the foreign journalist who best understands the US, goes on
London serves as the most visible symbol of a Europe that Trump’s national security strategy claims is facing “civilisational erasure”.
He notes that one part of Trump and minions’ animosity comes from the fact that the city where I live is the poster child for a successful multi-cultural society. It is an immigrant city.
The MAGA propaganda machine in the US led by Steve Bannon pumps out bilge depicting London as a violent crime-ridden hellscape despite facts like the murder rate being significantly lower than in any major American city. Whether measured per capita or in absolute numbers. Last year there were 97 homicides in the city, compared to more than 300 in New York or 127 in Washington DC.
Luce also points out that part of the MAGA assault on London comes from commercial concerns: the UK along with its erstwhile partners in Europe are trying to regulate the clearly harmful aspects of social media and the web. It doesn’t matter that Keir Starmer’s Labour government has maintained the National Health Service’s £330 million contract with Palantir, the data-mining company run by J.D. Vance’s benefactor, Peter Thiel.
This dovetailing of white Christian supremacy and commercial power under Trump has destabilized a system that was creaking and in need of shaking up as Chancellor Merz said, but to go back to the question at the beginning of this newsletter, are we more secure now?
The assault on international institutions trumpeted by Rubio and everyone else in the regime — institutions like the United Nations — is actually not new in the US. It has been a dark undercurrent since the world’s diplomatic, economic and legal architecture was created out of the catastrophe of the Second World War. In America, almost from the beginning, there was push-back against the UN in the far-corners of what was called “conservatism” but was really proto-MAGA.
Billboards like this sprang up all over the country in the 1950s. The Bolsheviks went on a long march to finally seize power in Russia, but MAGA — the descendants of the original Birchers and Richard Hofstadter’s Paranoid Style — went on an even longer if less bloody one — almost 70 years.
They were laughed at, mocked, ignored and now, allied with the new fortunes made in tech, they are in charge. But power has not brought them wisdom in international affairs. Their world view is horribly simplistic which is why wrecking is all they have to offer. That is no way to conduct foreign policy.
On Wednesday I thought this week’s newsletter would be about Iran. Lord knows social media is full of people calling for regime change and it is difficult not to have some sympathy with them.
Trump has broached the “A” word, “Armada”, to describe the deployment of two carrier strike groups to the Middle East. Last week, he met with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, who has been urging him to attack the Iran and overthrow the regime. As often happens with Trump, he suddenly realized that there was a downside to attempting regime change in the Islamic Republic and seemed to back away from imminent action.
Anyway, I will have time to get back to Iran and the difficulties of removing the Ayatollahs — militarily and politically — as it will be at least two weeks before the Armada is in place.
During this interval the possibility for miscalculation on all sides is frightening, which is why the answer to the question with which I began this newsletter is:
NO!
This was made for the BBC in early 2016 and aired just before the Presidential primaries began. Are you better off now than you were 10 years ago?
Michael, my initial response is, Hell No! My secondary is way too complicated.
It began with that image of Rubio. It looks very much like his soulless posturing at Trump Cabinet meetings. Makes me wonder at his words in Munich - and wherefrom they came. As carefully prepared and infused in the air as his continuing itinerary to Slovakia and Orban-land.
Your little “Ed. Notes” were like time grenades - lobbed for effect/affect. Good ones. Not sure of your dismissal of climatology as Trump also fired off a dismissal of “greenhouse” as if it will just go away. But it did keep you on task, nicely.
Your weekly tapestry is ready for hanging in your gallery of great weekly journeys. It came with just the right weave of future fears and current hopelessness.
Anchored with a resounding NO!
Thank you, Michael, for this insightful decoding of the ongoing MAGA assault on facts and on the harmony that held us with certainty since before white Marco was born. No mention from him about the almost one million Black humans in famine struck countries killed so far by Trump’s desertion of USAID or the extrajudicial killings on the high seas of 133 of those brown speedboat men allegedly running narcotics from South America.