Volodymyr Zelensky: The Oracle Of Munich
Last week’s Munich Security Conference underscored that strategic autonomy is Europe’s only option.
Who would have thought that a former comedian would turn out to be the most prescient strategic thinker in Europe? Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky stole the show at the Munich Security Conference on Saturday by stating that “an army of Europe” was needed as the continent can no longer count on the United States for its defense as it has for the last eighty years.
History will likely regard Zelensky’s words as the most significant voiced at this gathering since Vladimir Putin’s 2007 speech that criticized the United States for its unipolar domineering at a time when U.S. power was relatively slipping. Soon after, Putin launched wars in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014.
Zelensky’s admonition comes at a time of greater tumult for European security than any time since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the unification of Germany, and the end of the Cold War nearly two generations ago. President Trump also announced this week that the United States is starting bilateral negotiations with the Russians in Saudi Arabia without seats for European powers. All this despite steadfast and significant European support for Ukraine since the full-scale Russian invasion nearly three years ago.
Trump’s special envoy for Ukraine and Russia, the retired general Keith Kellogg, said in Munich that previous negotiations, like the Minsk agreements, had failed because there were too many negotiators and interests at play. Ultimately, those agreements did fail. However, the main problem was that the United States was not at the table due to President Obama’s myopic “lead from behind” approach. While Kellogg has indicated that the Europeans will be “considered,” this seems inadequate because in the event of successful negotiations, a very large if, the Trump administration has made it clear that it expects Europeans to be the continent’s dominant peacekeeping force.
Vice President JD Vance’s speech castigating Europeans for censorship, lax migration policies, and failing to uphold core principles of democracy was received about as negatively as Putin’s in Munich in 2007. Vance’s speech can be viewed as a harbinger of a growing wave of right-wing sentiment in Europe. Already, there is a conservative leader in Italy, Giorgia Meloni. The far-right Alternative for Deutschland Party (AfD) in Germany is now polling in second place and climbing rapidly. Moreover, Marine Le Pen will likely win the next French presidential election. What was not long ago viewed as extremism is now rapidly becoming mainstream.
Vance made clear in his speech and in his meeting with AfD co-leader Alice Weidel that the Trump administration is more than comfortable with this trend. Whether Vance’s meeting with AfD helps or hurts the party in next weekend’s elections in Germany remains to be seen.
While Vance’s speech caused an uproar in Munich, it was likely more motivated by domestic political interests. He wants to be viewed as Trump’s MAGA successor. In that way, the address covered Vance’s domestic political message under the guise of appeals to common European and American values of democracy and free speech.
It should be no surprise to anybody that the Trump administration is downgrading the value of its European partners. This is entirely consistent with his first term. Trump’s persistent expressions of the desire to control Greenland, the Panama Canal, and bring in Canada as a “fifty-first state” all evoke a worldview of late nineteenth-century imperial competition for resources and territorial control. It is both a Hobbesian world of anarchy and a Darwinian world of the survival of the fittest. The “international community” has been exposed as a fiction. According to this view, the “international community” and the “liberal rules-based international order” are fictions that have left the United States more vulnerable to predatory rule-breakers like China and Russia.
However, if this and other right-wing tendencies in the United States and Europe continue apace, the result will not be greater Western comity but rather the dominance of centrifugal forces. This is why Zelensky looks like the real oracle of Munich and Vance like the skunk at the garden party. Europe’s position as a “great power” is facing its greatest threat in eighty years. It will have no choice but to assert forcefully its independent security and economic interests in the months and years ahead.
Political change usually comes only as a result of the perception of crisis. The chickens of decades of economic stagnation and junior security status to Washington have come home to roost. The European unification project has moved in fits and starts for more than seventy years. Today may be the beginning of a new burst of progress not seen since the early 1990s after the conclusion of the Cold War. A more militarily and economically robust Europe would prove both a more valuable partner to Washington as well as a more credible check on U.S. unilateral excesses.
About the Author:
Andew Kuchins is a Senior Fellow at the Center for the National Interest and Adjunct Professor at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC.
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