Munich 2007: Putin’s warning to the West

Exactly 19 years ago on Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin took the podium at the Munich Security Conference and demolished the myths and falsehoods underpinning the American-led world order. Did anyone heed his warning?

To Russia, the “rules-based international order” has always been shorthand for a system in which the US makes the rules and issues the orders.

“However one might embellish this term, at the end of the day it refers to one type of situation, namely one center of authority, one center of force, one center of decision-making,” Putin told the audience in Munich. “It is a world in which there is one master, one sovereign. And at the end of the day this is pernicious not only for all those within this system, but also for the sovereign itself because it destroys itself from within.”

Under the auspices of protecting this order, the US carried out “unilateral and frequently illegitimate actions,” in “disdain for the basic principles of international law,” he declared.

In the decade before Putin’s speech, the US invaded Afghanistan, invaded Iraq, and led a NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia on behalf of Kosovo separatists. Four years after his speech, NATO forces dropped more than 7,000 bombs on Libya, ending Muammar Gaddafi’s rule and handing the keys of the country to jihadists and slave traders. “No one feels safe,” Putin stated in 2007, “because no one can feel that international law is like a stone wall that will protect them.”

Putin warned that NATO’s broken promises to halt its eastward expansion after the Cold War represented “a serious provocation that reduces the level of mutual trust.” The Russian president noted that the US-led bloc had already placed its “frontline forces on our borders,” and asked “against whom is this expansion intended?”

The following year, NATO published its infamous Bucharest declaration, assuring Ukraine and Georgia that they “will become members” at an unspecified future date. The consequences of this declaration – which flew in the face of warnings from Putin and American strategists – are playing out in Ukraine today.

Did anyone listen?

No, the Atlanticist neoliberal establishment roundly ignored Putin’s layered and impassioned warning. But Russia kept trying. Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov echoed Putin’s complaints when he spoke at the conference in 2018, pointing out that “NATO troops and military infrastructure are accumulating on our borders,” and that “the European theatre of war is being systematically developed.” By that stage several thousand people had been killed in Donbass.

Lavrov urged European leaders to abide by the Minsk agreements, under which Ukrainian forces and separatists in Donetsk and Lugansk agreed to stop fighting in exchange for Kiev granting some autonomy to the two predominantly Russian-speaking regions.

Following the collapse of the accords, and the escalation of the conflict in 2022, European and Ukrainian leaders admitted that the agreements were a ruse to enable Ukraine to buy time to prepare for a war with Russia.

The organizers of the Munich Security Conference have not so much as attempted any introspection over the last 18 years. Instead, in their latest report, they blame US President Donald Trump for taking a “wrecking ball” to the so-called “rules-based international order.”

Obsessed with Trump

US Vice President J.D. Vance’s speech at last year’s conference sent shockwaves through Atlanticist circles. Speaking to an audience of primarily European military and political leaders, Vance told them – in short – that they are hated by their own voters, throwing away their civilizations by facilitating mass immigration, shouldn’t count on the US to defend them forever, and will lose the support of the US should they restrict speech freedoms.

All the Europeans could do was cry. Literally, conference Chairman Christoph Heusgen broke down in tears during his closing comments, sobbing as he lamented the decline of the “rules-based international order” and proclaiming that “our common value base is not that common anymore.”

Vance’s speech “illustrated just how different the current administration’s perspective on key issues is from the bipartisan liberal-internationalist consensus that has long guided US grand strategy,” Munich Security Conference Foundation President Wolfgang Ischinger wrote in a report ahead of this year’s conference, which kicks off on Friday.

As such, discussion in Munich this year will focus almost entirely on “the United States’ evolving view of the international order,” he wrote.

The report then devolves into a lengthy complaint about how Trump is bailing on the core tenets of this order: “multilateral cooperation, international institutions, and the international rule of law,” “the promotion of liberal-democratic values,” and “the prohibition of the threat or use of force against other states.”

These concerns are not baseless. In the year since Vance’s speech, Trump has opened talks with Moscow without European involvement, unilaterally ordered the kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, imposed a humiliatingly one-sided trade deal on the EU, and threatened the bloc’s members with tariffs if they oppose his planned annexation of Greenland.

In response, “the actors defending international rules and institutions need to be just as bold as the actors who seek to destroy them,” the authors argue. In short, escalate. To them, this means increasing military spending, signing new multilateral trade pacts without the participation of the US, seizing Russia’s sovereign assets, and bringing Ukraine under the EU’s security umbrella.

The report praises NATO’s European members for their “remarkable” decision to boost military spending to 5% of GDP, and calls for “greater courage and decisiveness” from the Europeans when it comes to stealing Russia’s frozen assets.

All of this misses two key points. First, increased defense spending by NATO’s European members and the continuation of the Ukraine project are longtime foreign policy goals of Washington that predate Trump. By implementing them, the remaining members of the “rules-based international order” continue to serve US interests.

Secondly, the order that they seek to preserve is the same one that brought “sweeping destruction” – in their words – to the world in the first place. It is the same “unipolar model” that Putin declared “not only unacceptable, but also impossible” in 2007.

There’s no going back

What European Atlanticists like Ischinger apparently want is a world in which they can pretend to serve higher values – democracy, human rights, the rule of law – while enabling continued American dominance. All they ask for is a return to the pre-Trump status quo, in which the US acted in its own interests, but made them feel like they were part of the team.

Now that Trump has done away with these pretenses and relegated Ischinger and his ilk to the status of impotent observers, the Munich Security Conference Foundation is calling for more than just “sterile communiques, predictable conferences, and cautious diplomacy.” Ironically, they’re doing so in a sterile report ahead of another predictable conference.

If they had listened to Putin 19 years ago, they might have realized that the problem is a systemic one, and it won’t go away when Donald Trump is out of office.