The Munich Security Conference, of which I have been chairman since 2008, has also made intensive efforts in recent years to open up to the general public. As at the time of its founding in the 1960s, the purpose of each annual conference is to bring together the most important decisionmakers and visionaries in order to discuss, and often argue about, contemporary security policy challenges. This is becoming ever more important, as evident in the vastly increased interest in our main event in Munich. However, by no means do these challenges concern only the political elite. This is why today, in contrast to the founding years, the Munich debates are televised so that they can be followed by livestream all over the world.
This book is a further contribution to an essential public debate that is more necessary than ever in these turbulent times. The book’s express purpose is not to address the experts among us. This is a book for anyone who wants to better understand what is going wrong in the world right now, what that means for us, and what we can and must do about it. If it also manages to offer insights into the world of diplomacy and some understanding of the complexity of foreign policy today, then it has achieved its goal.
All uncertainties and superficialities are my doing. I was not able to deal with all current security policy issues equally intensively. Some important topics, such as cybersecurity and the rapid rise of China in the international arena, could only be touched on briefly, in order to leave enough scope to deal with fundamental questions of war and peace, national responsibility, and discussion of our relations to Russia and the United States, which are currently subjects of intense debate in Germany. And while I wrote the book before the coronavirus pandemic struck the world, none of the dangers discussed in the pages that follow—from the serious straining of the transatlantic relationship to growing challenges to European integration and stability—will disappear with the pandemic. If anything, the pandemic will exacerbate these threats.
For their many ideas and suggestions, I would like to thank my friends and colleagues at the Federal Foreign Office, where I worked for nearly forty years. I would also like to thank fellow members of the world of diplomacy and the extensive international community of think tanks, as well as colleagues and friends at the Hertie School of Governance, where I have been teaching as a senior professor.
I also owe a warm thanks to both Strobe Talbott, who connected me to the Brookings Institution Press and whose members have done a marvelous job of editing the book. Special thanks also goes to Susan Richter, who did the lion’s share of translating the German version of this book into English.
Without the continual and critical support and backing of my team at the Munich Security Conference (MSC), I never could have completed the project alongside all of the conferences, lecture events, and publications on my agenda. I would like to thank Dr. Benedikt Franke, chief executive officer of the MSC, and the entire MSC staff in Munich and Berlin.
Special thanks are due to the Policy Team of the MSC in Berlin, for their intensive and critical advice, particularly Dr. Tobias Bunde (head of policy and analysis), Adrian Oroz (who has since left for a foreign office career), and Lisa Marie Ullrich (head of my office), as well as Jamel Flitti and Randolf Carr. Dr. Sophie Eisentraut played a particularly important role in editing, updating, and refining this current English language version.
Finally, my office staff bore a heavy workload, especially Pia Zimmermann and Amadée Mantz, who had their hands full even without the book.
And without Jutta Falke-Ischinger, who backed the project with a combination of marital forbearance and professional journalistic advice, none of it would matter anyway.
BERLIN, MAY 2020
Wolfgang Ischinger
ONE
WORLD OUT OF JOINT
In January 2005, while I was serving as ambassador to the United States, Jutta and I were invited to an opulent ball in Palm Beach, Florida. The dress code for men was white tie and medals; for women, a long gown. The location of the Red Cross benefit ball was Mar-a-Lago, and the host was Donald Trump. Young men dressed as Roman gladiators carried torches as the guests, among them several of my fellow ambassadors and I, with our wives, traversed a long, red carpet to approach the host and his new wife, Melania. A real Hollywood experience! Later that evening I chatted with Donald Trump about his grandfather’s German roots—never suspecting that, to the surprise of almost everybody, this man would be elected the forty-fifth president of the United States of America in November 2016.
Since the very beginning of my diplomatic career, in the early 1970s, I have had opportunities to meet a great number of international political leaders. This began with Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s, followed by Ronald Reagan. In the 1980s I experienced the redoubtable Soviet Foreign Minister Gromyko, as well as the terrible Romanian dictator Nicholae Ceaușescu, and then Mikhail Gorbachev, George H. W. Bush, Maggie Thatcher, François Mitterrand, and Jacques Chirac. In the 1990s I had to negotiate with the Serbian President Slobodan Milošević, who was later put on trial in The Hague. During that process I also met Igor Ivanov, who later became Russian foreign minister, and whom I still call a friend today. As a member of the German chancellor’s delegation, I then met Vladimir Putin and, as ambassador to Washington, attempted to improve relations between George W. Bush and Germany, which had suffered greatly in the wake of the invasion of Iraq. As the chairman of the Munich Security Conference (MSC) for the last decade-plus, I have met a great many other state leaders, ministers, and international decisionmakers, from secretaries-general of the United Nations to presidents of the European Commission, from Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko all the way to Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif and his Saudi counterpart Adel al-Jubeir.
Several of these leaders were responsible for decisions with crucial geopolitical or historical consequences. Take Ronald Reagan, and his successor George H. W. Bush, or think of Helmut Kohl and Gorbachev: peaceful German reunification, the breakup of the Soviet Union!
But none of these many decisionmakers shook up and unsettled the world like President Trump has since taking office in January 2017. The entire established liberal world order is threatening to give way, and nothing is the way it was before.
That the world is more dangerous had become clear to many of us, of course, ever since 9/11, the Iraq War, and the bloody wars in Syria and then also in Yemen. When Putin annexed Crimea in 2014 and instigated the bloody conflict in Eastern Ukraine, many saw him to be the great alienator. Nobody could have known that the new American president, of all people, would be the one to challenge the whole established order—free trade as well as the Western canon of values and the principle of collective security anchored in Article 5 of the NATO treaty.
But how dangerous is the situation in actuality? “Global security is more endangered today than at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union” is a warning I have heard affirmed repeatedly, in many lectures.
German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier expressed it in similar terms back when he was foreign minister: “The world is out of joint.” We are apparently experiencing an epochal watershed; an era is ending, and the contours of a new geopolitical age are only starting to come into focus. The Munich Security Report published by the MSC in February 2019 called this the “great reshuffling of the pieces of the international order.” To date, it is hard to judge whether someone will be able to pick up the core elements of the global order and piece them back together—or whether the old order will be destroyed before the work on a new one has even begun.1
What is clear: No matter where one looks, there are countless conflicts in the world and multiple crises whose effects extend even to Europe. Many of them will be further exacerbated by the effects of the coronavirus pandemic. Today there are around 70 million people who have fled their homes due to conflict or persecution—a dismal record. And according to the Stockholm International