Really meet...

Where world’s power brokers really meet

Another winter gathering has quietly become the venue for smart thinkers to get to grips with geopolitics.

By MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG

For true “globalist elites,” it’s a rite of winter.

Just when the European weather is at its most unwelcoming, the world’s great strategic minds descend on a quaint city at the Continent’s geographic center, crowding into rustic Stuben to debate the state of the world over beer and mulled wine.

In recent years, this forum for Big Thought, aka the Munich Security Conference, has quietly become the event for the world’s great and the good.

Its alter-ego, the World Economic Forum, held this week in the remote Alpine redoubt of Davos, grabs more media attention, with its coterie of Hollywood stars, Silicon Valley prominence and Russian oligarchs. Problem is, despite Davos’ lofty declarations of purpose, critics say there’s no real there, there.

“It’s a society event and we’ve seen for years that the effects on policy are extremely small,” said former Davos-goer Heiner Flassbeck, who served as a senior German government official and chief economist of the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. “It’s a big show. There’s never any follow-up to the demands that are made there.”

Davos and Munich may appear to serve different aims at first glance. Yet while they’re not identical, their shared focus on tackling global threats, be they military or economic, has made the conferences’ agendas almost indistinguishable.

“Munich is still the jewel in the crown of the international security conference circuit and the one that is guaranteed to make headlines,” said Anders Fogh Rasmussen, the former Danish premier and NATO secretary-general who’s in Davos this week. “Munich is similar to Davos in many aspects: It’s a whirlwind of events and networking where the fringe is often just as interesting as the speeches in the main hall.”

By rejecting Davos’ jet-set ostentation, however, Munich has made itself the thinking person’s preferred destination.

The return of geopolitics hasn’t hurt either. In an era in which hard power increasingly trumps the soft, Munich finds itself back in demand. Over the years, it has often served as a venue for the world’s leading powers to send messages to allies and adversaries, to telegraph policy shifts or even to make threats.

It was in Munich in 2009, for example, that then-Vice President Joe Biden delivered the Obama administration’s first major address on foreign policy, famously saying it was time “to press the reset button” on relations with Russia. On the fringes of last year’s conference, Germany and France negotiated a ceasefire (ultimately short-lived) in eastern Ukraine.

“Munich is the place to go to hear bold policies announced, new ideas and approaches tested, old partnerships reaffirmed and new ones formed,” Biden, a regular since 1980, gushed while he was still U.S. vice president. “Like no other global forum, today’s Munich connects European leaders and thinkers with their peers from across the world.”

Founded in 1963 by Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, one of the German Wehrmacht officers who plotted to assassinate Hitler, Munich began as an exchange between German and American politicians and security officials. The Cold War was at its peak. The Berlin Wall was less than two years old. The world had just narrowly averted nuclear war during the Cuban missile crisis.

Then known as the Internationale Wehrkunde-Begegnung (International Conference of Military Science), the conference soon expanded to become the most important Cold War-era security forum. Over the years, generations of strategic thinkers have contributed to the discussions, from unknown behind-the-scenes advisers to bold-faced names.

Held in a cramped, old-world hotel well past its prime, the conference eschews most of the trappings of luxury. Guests can expect neither bowls of caviar nor vodka luges. They are more likely to share a dance floor with Henry Kissinger than Mick Jagger.

But that’s the point. Munich may be the “Academy Awards for security policy wonks,” as an American NATO ambassador once put it, but that’s because it’s about substance, not show.

For a time after the Berlin Wall fell, Wehrkunde, as old timers still call it, appeared to have outlived its usefulness. But when Kleist decided to cancel it in 1997, there was an uproar. Richard Burt, a former U.S. ambassador to Germany, even wrote to Helmut Kohl, asking him to intervene.

Wehrkunde returned a year later.

Doubts about the conference’s viability evaporated after the 2001 terrorist attacks on the U.S. and the wars that followed. It was then, amid deep divisions over the Iraq War, that the conference proved its continued relevance. In 2003, then-German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer openly challenged U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld about the evidence Washington said it had about Saddam Hussein’s purported weapons of mass destruction.

“I’m not convinced,” Fischer told a stone-faced Rumsfeld from the stage.

Once focused squarely on NATO and transatlantic security, the conference has expanded its brief to examine myriad global security threats and challenges, from global warming to cyberwarfare.

The circle of participants has also grown to include leading figures from Asia, the Middle East, and even from the enemy state Wehrkunde was established to combat: Russia.

Indeed, it was in Munich in 2007 that Vladimir Putin shocked the gathering by signalling a sea change in Russia’s stance toward the U.S., lashing out at Washington for expanding the NATO alliance and accusing America of undermining global security with a go-it-alone approach. The West’s relationship with Russia has been icy ever since.

While Russia remains in focus, there will be other fare for Munich-goers to get their teeth into. Prime Minister Theresa May has chosen the conference as the venue for a speech aimed at reassuring her European allies that Britain intends to remain closely aligned with them on foreign policy and security matters post Brexit.

Many in the audience will be more interested these days in any hints about the direction of U.S. policy. Last year, amid concerns that President Donald Trump was turning his back on NATO, the Munich stage served as an international coming out for the new administration.

Vice President Mike Pence delivered a speech aimed at calming allies’ nerves — which worked for a few days.

After a year of brash tweets and broad confusion over Washington’s priorities, the U.S. will face much the same task at this year’s gathering, scheduled for February 16-18. There’s no official word yet on who will lead the U.S. delegation, though it appears that Trump himself has opted for that flashier alternative in the Swiss Alps.