Leaders set for Munich Security Conference as world order in danger of crumbling happymamay

Vice President of the United States, JD Vance, President of Ukraine Zellinski and up to 60 world leaders and decision makers are scheduled to be held in Munich during the next three days of Munich’s annual security conference (MSC).

Nearly two decades ago, I was attending and covering this event for the BBC and I cannot think about a year when there was a lot at stake regarding global security. “This is the most dangerous and competitive time in my career,” said a senior Western official with great experience this week.

Why?

Simply put, the current global security order-the international regime based on international rules-is at risk of collapse. Some may argue that this really happens.

When President Putin launched a large scale of Ukraine three years ago, he was widely convicted by many-although not everything-in the world. NATO, the European Union and the West in general have reached an extraordinary level of unity in the gathering together to help Ukraine to defend itself, without attracted to a direct conflict with Russia.

With the exception of some deviation from Slovakia and Hungary, there was a general consensus that Putin’s invasion should be seen as failing or that NATO himself would weaken critically while Russia would eventually be tempted by the invasion of another neighboring country, such as Estonia. It was often said that Ukraine should be given everything that it takes and as long as it took it to secure a permanent peace from the position of power.

Not more than that.

President Trump has effectively withdrawn the carpet from the position of negotiations in Ukraine through recognition, through Defense Minister Beit Higseth, that the restoration of Ukraine’s lands to where before the first Russian invasion in 2014 was simply “unrealistic.”

The United States has also destroyed Kiev’s hopes of joining NATO, a major ambition for President Zelinski, and has ruled out the sending of American forces to help protect its borders the next time Russia has decided to invade.

A greater shock came with the news that President Trump apparently made a 90 -minute phone call with President Putin, thus suddenly ending the West’s freezing for three years in speaking to the Russian leader who had been present from the time of invasion.

Over the next 72 hours, we will hear in Munich from President Trump’s team here in Munich, what are the details of their plan for Ukraine. Some of them still have to work after his envoy, the retired general of the US Army Keith Kelog, traveling to Kiev next week.

But at the present time, the NATO unit is poorly inverted because it is clear that there is a wide difference in opinion on Ukraine between Washington and Europe. One wants the war to end as soon as possible, even if that means giving up many Moscow’s demands.

The other still believes, at least until this week, that with Russia’s loss of about a thousand victims of the battlefield per day, its economy faces long -term problems, the best way to win permanent peace is to keep pace with the pressure on Moscow, so that its army was exhausted and agreed to the conditions of peace More convenient for Ukraine.

This will not happen now.

For the NATO alliance, now in its seventy -seventh year, there are other disturbing cracks that began to appear, which will also come for discussion here at the Munich Security Conference.

President Trump announced last month that he wanted to “buy” Greenland, an independent part of the Kingdom of Denmark. When Denmark Prime Minister Frederxon confirmed that “Greenland is not for sale”, she followed the so -called “horrific” phone call by Donald Trump, who did not rule out the use of power to take Greenland.

The idea of ​​a NATO country threatened to seize another part of the NATO region that could not yet be conceived. In the case of Greenland, there is no justification for them on the security land where there are more American forces in Greenland more than the Danish and Copenhagen, we are pleased to agree on ways to increase the mutual defense of the island.

But even if nothing of this idea is, most Scandinavian countries hope that this is the case, in some respects it has already happened. The message came out of the free world leader that it is okay to threaten your neighbors by force if you want their lands.

“It may be the case,” says Lord Kim Darut, a former national adviser in the United Kingdom and the British ambassador to Washington.

Washington’s European allies will search for some reassurance here in Munich that this is not the case. But President Trump is already on his way to reshaping America’s role in the world, and indications are that he is unlikely to listen to any complaints coming from Europe.