# Munich Security Conference The Munich Security Conference is the world's most consequential annual gathering on international security policy — founded in 1963 as a West German forum on transatlantic defence, and now the venue where the health of the Western alliance is publicly measured each February. It has no decision-making authority. Its significance is entirely as a **stage**: what gets said at Munich sets the tone for the year, and the conference has a long record of hosting the speech that turns out to have marked a turn. Putin's 2007 address rejecting a unipolar world is the standard example. > [!note] Chairmanship > **Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger is Chairman.** Christoph Heusgen stepped down after the 2025 conference and **Jens Stoltenberg** was announced as successor — but he was appointed Norway's finance minister in February 2025 and deferred, joining the Foundation Council in November 2025 and taking the chair "once his public duties in Norway have come to an end," with no date set. Some reference sources incorrectly list the German Chancellor as chairman; that is a conflation with the host role. ## Vance, 2025 The 61st conference, 14–16 February 2025, produced the speech. [[JD Vance]] used his address to attack European free-expression and migration policy and to describe "the threat from within" — and, in a security speech to a security conference during a European land war, **never named Russia as a security concern.** The vault covers it separately at [[Vance Munich Security Conference Speech]]. Its significance was that an American vice-president used the alliance's premier forum to argue that the primary danger to Europe was European governance rather than any external adversary. ## Rubio, 2026 The 62nd conference met **13–15 February 2026**. The US delegation was led by Secretary of State [[Marco Rubio]] — not Vance — an assignment announced roughly four days beforehand and widely read as deliberate. **Rubio spoke on 14 February 2026, one year to the day after Vance.** The tone was markedly different. He said America and Europe "belong together," invoked the first conference in 1963, said that "for us Americans, we will always be a child of Europe," and called on the alliance to "renew the greatest civilization in human history." The substance overlapped with Vance's on migration, climate policy, and multilateralism. Belgium's defence minister summarized it as "pretty much the same," delivered "in a very diplomatic way." The European Commission president said she felt reassured; Norway's foreign minister said "some damage has been done" and detected the same programme throughout. Also speaking: [[Volodymyr Zelenskyy]], NATO's Secretary General, the UK prime minister, [[Emmanuel Macron]], and the Commission president. Main themes were Ukrainian security guarantees — including a fifteen-year American proposal — European strategic autonomy, Iran, Greenland, technology, and the erosion of international norms. The **congressional delegation was bipartisan and large**, co-led by senators [[Sheldon Whitehouse]] and [[Lindsey Graham]], and including [[Chris Coons]], [[Mark Kelly]], [[Jeanne Shaheen]], [[Elissa Slotkin]], [[Thom Tillis]], [[Roger Wicker]], [[Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez]], and governors [[Gretchen Whitmer]] and [[Gavin Newsom]]. That composition is itself a data point: Munich has become the venue where American legislators go to say, in person, that the executive branch does not speak for the whole country. ### Two controversies **The [[AfD]] was readmitted** after a two-year exclusion, announced in December 2025. Ischinger defended the decision on the grounds that the conference "traditionally aims to present as broad a spectrum of opinions as possible, including opposing views," and that policing the AfD is a matter for political parties rather than a conference. Espionage concerns were raised. **Iran was disinvited.** Invitations to the Iranian foreign minister were withdrawn after domestic protests and state violence; the exiled crown prince attended instead. Over 250,000 people demonstrated in solidarity with Iranian protesters on 14 February. ## The 2026 Report The Munich Security Report is published each year ahead of the conference and functions as the European security establishment's collective assessment. The 2026 edition is titled **"Under Destruction."** Its themes: structural collapse of the rules-based order; Russian hybrid warfare — sabotage, cyber operations, drone incursions — across EU and NATO territory; **American strategic retreat**; and European defence fragmentation, where budgets rose 41% between 2021 and 2025 while procurement stayed divided and **51% dependent on US equipment**. Ischinger's framing was that a "wrecking ball" is smashing the international order, with political forces inside the West favouring "destruction over reform." The report's call is to move "from anxiety to agency." ## Why It Matters Here Munich is the annual, public, on-the-record instrument for reading the alliance — which makes it the most useful single fixture in this whole cluster. Everything else the vault tracks in the 2025–26 sequence happens through documents: a memorandum, a Federal Register notice, an unfilled appointment, an unpaid assessment. See the [[US Treaty and Organization Withdrawal Timeline]]. Munich is where the same shift gets stated aloud by named people to an audience of allies, and where the allies respond in real time. The Vance-to-Rubio sequence is the clearest available measure of what changed and what didn't. The tone was repaired; the policy content was not. That gap — warmer language, identical substance — is worth more than either speech alone, and it is the reason to keep watching the February slot. ## See Also - [[Vance Munich Security Conference Speech]] — the 2025 address - [[NATO]] · [[NATO Summit Ankara 2026]] — the alliance's formal machinery - [[OSCE]] — the pan-European security body that includes Russia - [[Coalition of the Willing]] — the Ukraine security vehicle discussed at Munich - [[AfD]] — readmitted in 2026 - [[Democratic Backsliding]]