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Munich Hosts a Beleaguered West
Carnegie Europe is on the ground at the 2016 Munich Security Conference,
offering readers exclusive access to the debates as the unfold and
providing insights on today’s most urgent international issues. Follow
our live coverage here.*
If they haven’t already received it, participants at this year’s Munich Security Conference will be given the Munich Security Report. Called “Boundless Crises, Reckless Spoilers, Helpless Guardians,” it sets out a very pessimistic state of the world.
There is no need to enumerate the wars, conflicts, famines, or climate change catastrophes to this annual gathering of presidents, prime ministers, foreign and defense ministers, and security experts. These issues dominate the news as much as they dominate the report. But what this report does not address is the inexorable decline of the West and what the West can do to regain its influence. That influence and Western support for other countries that aspire to democracy will not reemerge until Europe and the United States accept that they have to build a new transatlantic relationship. The old one is over—not that either side will admit it.
The old alliance was taken for granted during the Cold War, when Europe became completely dependent on the U.S. security guarantee. The relationship’s permanence was assumed and never challenged because of the ideological divide between West and East. Also unchallenged, for that matter, were the West’s system of values and its use of hard or soft power.
But it wasn’t just the end of the Cold War, as is so often argued, that changed the dynamics of the transatlantic relationship, the alliance’s shallowness, or Europe’s weakness. It was 9/11.
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