The New Meaning of ‘Munich’

For more than eight decades, the word “Munich” has meant one thing in international relations: a catastrophic policy of appeasement. Now, “Munich” may soon take on a fresh—and possibly even more fraught—meaning: the voluntary surrender of global hegemony.

In a series of remarks leading up to the just-ended Munich Security Conference, senior Trump administration officials—including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio—signaled that the United States is substantially retreating from the greatest alliance in history, NATO, and that China and Russia could have what they’ve long sought: a “multipolar world,” in Rubio’s words. This was capped by a blustery, insulting speech in Munich by U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance—remarks that some European officials interpreted as “the opening salvo in a trans-Atlantic divorce proceeding,” according to foreign-policy analyst Richard Fontaine.

Rubio, accompanied by President Donald Trump’s national security advisor, Michael Waltz, then flew to Saudi Arabia to meet with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov—all without European or Ukrainian participation. The object: to pursue a peace settlement in the Russia-Ukraine war and, as Rubio said Tuesday, to “unlock the door” to “incredible opportunities that exist to partner with the Russians geopolitically.”

Trump even said that he wanted to invite Russian President Vladimir Putin, who faces an arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court over allegations of war crimes, back into the G-8 group of nations.

Astonishingly, Trump later appeared to echo Russian talking points by blaming Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky—who complained about being left out of the Russia talks in Saudi Arabia—for starting the war, which was begun by Putin in 2022.

“You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” Trump told Zelensky in remarks to reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort. And all this is on top of the new tariff war that Trump just launched against the United States’ closest friends in the European Union.

Little of this comes as a complete surprise. Trump’s “Make America Great Again” movement has been signaling such a shift for months, if not years. And the U.S.-orchestrated global order—which, for most of the past 80 years since World War II, U.S. officials of both political parties fully supported—was starting to fall apart even before Trump began suggesting that he was no longer interested in being leader of the free world.

But by brazenly treating some of Washington’s key allies as adversaries—and its autocratic adversaries as partners—Trump may be administering the death blow to a once-stable world system in which Washington served as overseer of a powerful alliance of democracies. As another Munich attendee, Georgetown University scholar Charles Kupchan, put it to me: “The atmosphere in Munich was that of a funeral.”

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How far could the unwinding of the U.S.-led global system go? It’s not yet clear. Moving at breakneck speed, Trump appears to be doing far more damage than expected only a month into office.

Also, one of the messages that Europe took from Vance’s appearance in Munich on Valentine’s Day was not just the decidedly unloving content of his speech—in which the vice president openly embraced far-right European politics while ostensibly defending free speech—but the implicit staying power of that message given Vance’s youth.

Europe can no longer pretend, in other words, that U.S. politics has been briefly hijacked by a 78-year-old huckster (as many of them see Trump) who will soon depart the scene. Vance is just 40 years old and perceived as the heir to the neo-isolationist America First movement (though Trump himself is not quite ready to grant him that title).

And the veep and his MAGA supporters have as little love as Trump does for what they see as an all-too-leftist Europe. The fact that Vance could visit Dachau one day and meet the next day with Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany party (which has been criticized for its connections with openly neo-Nazi groups) —all without betraying any sense of historical irony—suggests that the postwar trans-Atlantic consensus may really be over. It’s noteworthy that Vance’s speech to the same Munich conference a year ago, when he was still a U.S. senator, was titled: “Europe Must Stand on Its Own Two Feet on Defense.”

Indeed, Vance’s bizarre speech on Feb. 14—which had nothing to do with security and everything to do with culture and politics—should probably be seen mainly as an appeal to his MAGA home audience and perhaps the effective start to his 2028 presidential campaign.

“There are folks inside the administration who are simply thrilled to be bringing tears to the eyes of the Europeans,” said one Republican international relations expert familiar with the Trump officials’ thinking, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “There is a lingering anger from Trump’s first term toward the bien-pensant crowd in Brussels who openly criticized Trump’s domestic politics and came out against the Dobbs decision.” (That was the 2022 Supreme Court decision overturning the constitutional right to abortion.)

Moreover, says this expert, there is an emerging dominance of “restrainers” or realists in the new administration who want to scale down the United States’ global presence. The Defense Department is already developing plans to remove all remaining U.S. troops in Syria, and it will possibly shift some of the troops deployed in Europe to the U.S. southern border, the expert said.

It is striking that even Rubio, once considered a traditional Republican hawk—that is, a stalwart believer in U.S. global hegemony—appears to be surrendering to a new global status quo. In a Jan. 30 interview with conservative pundit Megyn Kelly, Rubio effectively conceded to Russia and China what both nations had long been seeking: that we now live in a multipolar world and that Washington’s unipolar power had merely been “an anomaly.”

“It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multigreat powers in different parts of the planet,” Rubio said.

The problem, however, is that Trump often behaves in ways that suggest that he thinks the United States is still the global hegemon.

“He thinks America’s bargaining position is incredibly strong, that we can get massively better deals at better cost,” said William Wohlforth, an international relations scholar at Dartmouth College. “So that’s not really consistent with this idea of multipolarity,” he added.

It’s fashionable to write that Trump just makes policies up as he goes along, such as his seemingly immoral—and monumentally ahistorical—idea of ridding Gaza of Palestinians and turning it into the “Riviera” of the Middle East. But in fact, Trump has been remarkably consistent in his view that Washington has no business being caretaker to the world—going back to the late 1980s, when as a real-estate magnate, he took out a full-page New York Times ad that said, “The world is laughing at American politicians as we protect ships we don’t own, carrying oil we don’t need, destined for allies who won’t help.”

In some ways, Trump is a reversion to the pre-World War II norm of Republican geopolitics. In recent weeks, much has been made of the 47th president’s 19th-century approach to power—stemming from his bid for greater hemispheric primacy over Greenland and the Panama Canal, as well as his embrace of the tariff policies similar to those of former President William McKinley.

But he also represents a return to the early-to-mid 20th century Taft Republicanism, named for Sen. Robert Taft. Once known as “Mr. Republican,” Taft fought the New Deal and backed the America First Committee, the pre-World War II version of Trump’s movement. Former President Dwight Eisenhower silenced that isolationist wing of the GOP 70 years ago as the Cold War got underway. Now it seems to be back, redefined as “national conservatism.”

Former President Joe Biden worked hard to restore the U.S. role as the supposed overseer of the global order and portray Trump, and his disruptive first term, as an outlier. But the main message of the 2024 election was that it was Biden, not Trump, who was the interlude from history. The advent of Trump II—and the way that he’s upended Washington and the world order in just a month—shows that history is returning with a vengeance.

The question is, how much of that history will return? Without U.S. leadership, will we revert to the old-style balance-of-power geopolitics that ruled for centuries, including for part of the Cold War, in which weaker powers join together to counterbalance the strong?

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Much now depends on the European nations in NATO, many of which are pledging a new independence in the wake of Munich—perhaps even a balancing against what some now see as a rogue U.S. power.

“But they don’t know yet what to do about it,” said Jeremy Shapiro, a research director for the European Council on Foreign Relations. He added: “The extent of their dependence in security, economic, and energy terms on the U.S. means that they are currently almost helpless in the face of a predatory American administration. Even if they now have a broader consensus about the problem, they have little consensus on the solution.”

That became clear on Monday, when French President Emmanuel Macron, in his latest bid to drive Europe toward “strategic autonomy,” called an emergency meeting in Brussels. On the agenda was developing a strategy to protest Washington’s decision to leave European leaders out of the negotiations with Russia. As Politico described it, “Leaders came up with no new joint ideas, squabbled over sending troops to Ukraine, and once again mouthed platitudes on aiding Ukraine and boosting defense spending.”

Many defense experts believe that, even with an all-out effort, it would take more than a decade for European countries to develop the intelligence and logistical capabilities, as well as cross-border defense industries, to come close to replacing the United States.

Moreover, to adapt a saying by the great Scottish economist Adam Smith, there is “a great deal of ruin” in an international system. It takes a long time, in other words, to destroy 80 years of institution building, much less a post-World War II globalized economy still held together by an iron law: Countries must take part in it to prosper. Meanwhile, Russia is badly weakened and drained by its bloody three-year debacle in Ukraine, and China is not close to being on par with either Washington’s power or its alliance system.

Thus, while what we are witnessing is clearly something more than a simple reset of relations—especially with European nations still seething over the rebukes they got from Vance and Hegseth last week—it is also probably something less than a return to a state of nature. Even in a multipolar world, the United States is still the dominant power.

“I don’t see it going all the way back to pure spheres of influence or a balance of power system, in which barriers to territorial conquest are lowered,” said Wohlforth, the Dartmouth scholar. “The U.S. has alliances with countries that possess 70 percent of world GDP. This means that any revisionist power still has to contemplate an unbelievably high cost if it wants to transform the status quo through territorial change.”

Putin has found that out with the loss of hundreds of thousands of troops and a great deal of status since he invaded Ukraine on Feb. 22, 2022. “He’s probably sacrificed 2 percent of his GDP for the next 10 years,” Wohlforth said. “He’s sacrificed modernization and diversity of his export portfolio, and he’s sacrificed his autonomy, since he’s dependent on help from China, Iran, and North Korea. I doubt that other powers [such as China] will want to emulate that experience.”

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Some Russia experts believe that if Trump handles relations right, he can actually restabilize Europe and induce Putin to stop where he is with partial control of eastern Ukraine, without further threatening any Central European countries.

“The world is a much more dangerous place when the world’s two leading nuclear powers don’t have a substantive dialogue ongoing, and that’s been true for the last three years,” said Thomas Graham, a Russia expert at the Council on Foreign Relations who once worked for U.S. President George W. Bush.

“Restarting the dialogue is extremely important. One reason Russia has welcomed this engagement by the Trump administration is that it validates Russia as a great power. And in a strange way, Russia’s own sense of itself is dependent on recognition from the United States. That is a point of leverage for the United States if you know how to play it.”

Graham believes that Putin only wants to exert direct control over the “Slavic core” of the old Russian empire, including Belarus, parts of Ukraine, and perhaps parts of Kazakhstan. “He’s not interested in the Baltics,” Graham said. “He may want continuing influence in the Caucasus and Central Asia, but he doesn’t want outright control.”

Kupchan, the Georgetown scholar and a specialist in trans-Atlantic relations, agreed in part. “In a sense, what Trump is doing needs to be done. I think a bilateral dialogue between Russia and the United States is overdue,” said Kupchan, who served on President Barack Obama’s National Security Council.

“I just wish they knew what they were doing. They keep giving away the store before the negotiations even begin,” Kupchan added. “And the insults are so unnecessary. To have the vice president of the United States show up and insult his hosts and tell them they need to start dealing with a party that has its roots in National Socialism is outrageous.”

Trump’s approach to China and Asia—and whether the United States will seek to retreat from a possible defense of Taiwan, as Trump has sometimes hinted—remains to be seen.

In the face of Washington’s retreat, the world is clearly returning, to some degree, to the balance of power geopolitics that has reigned since ancient times. What we don’t know yet is what happens when this balance of power is reinforced by nuclear deterrence—and, perhaps, enforced by cyberdeterrence and other new tech threats.

How stable might it be? The next four years will tell.