Munich Security Conference Dominated by NATO Utopians

This year’s annual meeting of the Munich Security Conference (Feb. 17-19) totally abandoned its long-time claim of serving as a forum for dialogue with Russia, by simply not inviting any Russian officials, for the first time ever. This move also reflects the transition of the MSC chairmanship from Wolfgang Ischinger to Christoph Heusgen, an unbridled NATO utopian (cf. SAS 51/14). He insisted in an interview on the eve of the conference that Russia needs to undergo “deputinization”, a term that harks back to the denazification of Germany carried out by the Allies after World War II.

Heusgen also asserts in his recently published book Führung und Verantwortung (Leadership and Responsibility), that a new beginning in relations with Russia could “only be made with a different government in Moscow that acts on the basis of international law and is prepared to carry out something at home like the ‘denazification’ that took place in Germany at the time.” In other words, the old utopian belief that Vladimir Putin could be ousted by the usual regime change strategy.

Heusgen otherwise is an integral part of the ongoing NATO narrative that Russia will lose the war, provided more and more heavy weaponry is provided to Kyiv, and that Ukraine is about to retake the Donbass and Crimea. Solving the conflict through diplomacy is not an option for such “experts”. In the case of Heusgen, he had made the same error in judgment in refusing talks on Syria, when he was Chancellor Angela Merkel’s chief foreign policy advisor from 2005 to 2017, and then German Ambassador to the UN. His position was that no relations with Syria were possible as long as the President Assad remained in power.