(This blog is a companion piece that provides further detail on an essay published on 12 February in The EU Observer.)
The Munich Security Conference in 2025 was notable for a number of reasons. It was during that period of time when people were wondering whether or not Elon Musk was really going to be allowed to dismantle and defame USAID and the rest of the soft power foreign policy establishment that had served the United States so well for decades. And MSC 2025 was the platform where US Vice President Vance stood in front of a room full of leaders who he should have viewed as his allies and instead unleashed a disrespectful and arrogant tirade demonstrating that the US was pivoting away from its long-term trusted allies, and instead was prepared to curry favor with autocrats, petrostates, the extreme political right in Europe, and anyone willing to facilitate a deal that would enrich the current presidential administration and his allies.
As 2025 continued to unfold, it became clear that the United States was no longer the same country, either in terms of its democratic practice at home, nor in terms of its role on the international stage. Whether considering the damage to the international trade system through unpredictable and often petty tariff levies or threats of tariffs, the pardoning of a former Honduran leader found guilty of narcotrafficking in American courts, followed shortly thereafter by the military action in Venezuela that resulted in the extraction and some would say kidnapping of the current leader, or the threats to “take” Greenland to somehow make it a colony or adjunct to the United States, it is clear that the US is determined to destroy an international system that has worked quite well for it. The implication of its published National Security and National Defense Strategy is one of a US seeking hegemonic power for itself, while accepting its pursuit by Russia and China – a Yaltified world with all others “on the menu,” as Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney put it in his memorable Davos speech last month.
In its self-interest, European Union and other democratic states need to firmly demonstrate in Munich that they have no illusions that the world is now a very different place. While many countries, including EU member states, had hoped that they could lay low and see if the United States comes back to its senses in the next presidential election, the damage done has been so thorough, and the division and polarization in the United States itself is so considerable, that it will be a generation before the country can be considered trustworthy and predictable again. We think the cover charge for reentry should be high. The democratic world should neither hide from this reality, nor think that they should jettison their commitment to democratic values and a rules-based order; if democratic countries think they can beat authoritarian systems at their own game, it will be a race to the bottom that everyone will lose.
Instead, these countries should embrace the notion that they are offering something different in this newly emerging world. While Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney used the term “middle powers,” and we at DPC have suggested the term “Europe Plus”, it’s clear that this constellation of countries should recognize that their value-added in an increasing rules-free world is in fact their values. They need to begin to act with the same confidence that their non-democratic peers have demonstrated. To be effective, they need to do so collectively, in a coordinated fashion. Since the end of the Second World War, the US served as the center of gravity and universal connector of the democratic world. The center of gravity is now the EU/Europe+; yet it is clearly having difficulty recognizing it has inherited that role, let alone that it should be prepared to exercise it.
While referring to these countries as middle powers is useful in terms of contrasting these countries with an unpredictable and increasingly undemocratic United States, a rising authoritarian China, and a socioeconomically weak but militarily formidable nuclear Russia, the word “middle” undersells the power and suasion of these countries. Beyond their considerable economic heft as a collective, these countries offer a vision of hope and an ideal towards which other countries and individuals still do aspire.
DPC has therefore outlined in broad terms what we hope we will hear these leaders say and confirm while together in Munich on the stage, or in side-bar conversation. While the damage that the United States is doing to itself economically and to a world facing climate peril is incalculable, science and economics are on the side of those who recognize that the era of petrochemicals and fossil fuels is over. The EU and anyone who believes this reality should work together, countering the harm, and self-harm, the US is committing.
The EU and its allies can also be in the front ranks of preventing the total anarchy of technological and AI pressure and subversion that is the desired end-state by many who desire to profit from tech markets or even the social disruption that unregulated technology can enable. They can take the experience they have in at minimum monitoring and at best preventing misinformation and disinformation from flooding their social spaces; experience they have learned through the experience of dealing with malign actors like Russia, but which can be applied to others such as the United States. They can be a voice to ensure that countries not to mention individuals have a say in whether or not their children are sent personalized revenge porn on their phones, or whether the intellectual property theft of AI further shuts down voices and proper reporting in terms of journalism by offering instead the never-ending polluting doom scroll. It is worth remembering that one of the reasons that some would like to see the destruction of the European Union is because then there would be no GDPR, no Digital Service Act (DSA) an no future regulation to prevent the will to power of Silicon Valley technologists and nihilists. The fact that Secretary of State Marco Rubio will be coming to Munich, and has announced plans to only visit two of the most reactionary countries in the EU, Slovakia and Hungary, shows once again that the US, as articulated in its National Security Strategy, is prepared to destabilize and disrupt the European Union in order to bring its own social and political polarization to the continent.
European Union participants in Munich can also use the time to continue to determine how the EU can best strengthen itself as a geopolitical bloc, among its current members (including the weakest links), but also in terms of its enlargement agenda. This has been slow and disappointing in the Western Balkans, largely because the EU has pursued lacking any vision or strategy, instead pursuing it through the presumption that its partners are the regional leadership class, rather than citizens who express consistent desire for the Union’s declared values for rule of law, democracy, and accountability, and human dignity writ large. The forces which hold sway in that region are a microcosm of those gaining traction in the wider world, exemplified by Washington and Moscow. An enlarged EU rededicated to being an assertive community of values, employing all its levers of influence, is one that could naturally enlarge. This is not a matter of charity, but an urgent matter of collective self-defense against the global forces of unaccountable power and their local allies and partners.
To refer back to Canada once more, MSC 2026 needs to be an “elbows up” moment for Europe+, in which it recognizes its collective strengths, strategizes to remediate its vulnerabilities, and projects a collective self-confidence to potential partners and adversaries alike.