Europe remains unusually quiet regarding the US-proposed 30-day ceasefire, which Ukraine has endorsed. Yet beneath and beyond this 21st-century iteration of All Quiet on the Western Front, the old world appears moving beyond its “abusive relationship” with Washington.
In a striking departure from eight decades of transatlantic dynamics, Paris just hosted a military summit bringing together military chiefs from 34 European and NATO countries—along with Japan and Australia—without U.S. participation. The declared goal was to form a 30,000-strong multinational force to be deployed across Ukraine as “security guarantees” for Kiev to prevent a 21st-century replay of the 1938 “Munich betrayal.” Beyond that, a more independent Europe with its own defense capabilities would also alleviate Europe’s strategic loneliness between a hostile Russia in the east and an increasingly going-alone America, at least for the next four years.
Europe’s timeless addiction to the Munich analogy, however, is problematic at best in terms of its historical narrative, conceptual consistency, and policy application.
Munich Meltdown
By the time the 61st MSC convened in mid-February, Europeans were already in the panic mode by US Secretary of Defense Hegseth’s “three NOs” for a Ukraine peace deal: no NATO membership for Ukraine, no return to its 2014 borders, and no US troops on Ukraine soil. Two days later, US Vice President J.D. Vance dropped the second shoe at the MSC by scolding Europe for its excessive censorship, out-of-control migration, and discrimination against far-right political parties. No sooner had the MSC ended with a rising sense of insecurity than Trump’s third strike fell in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where top Russian and American officials convened to discuss Ukraine without European participation.
The flip-flop of the US approach to the Ukraine conflict was just the beginning of a rapidly unfolding war of words across the Atlantic. Trump went as far as to blame Zelensky for the war. “You should have never started it. You could have made a deal,” said Trump during a news conference. The Trump-Zelensky duel even became deeply personal, with Trump branding Zelensky an illegitimate “dictator” after the Ukraine leader accused him of living in a “disinformation space.” Meanwhile, U.S.-Russia diplomacy accelerated, with a second high-level meeting in Turkey on February 27.
Until recently, Europeans had been on a joyride with Biden toward a “never-land” in the East “for as long as it takes.” The heated Trump-Zelensky exchange at the White House shows that the US commander-in-deals not only ejected himself from the driver’s seat, leaving his European allies screaming in the backseats, but also tossed out the steering wheel (US “leadership” in the Ukraine war). Welcome to the Trumpian land of chaos for deals!
Across Europe and parts of North America, what Trump is doing is tantamount to a dramatic replay of the infamous and catastrophic “Munich appeasement” in 1938. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times in London went as far as to declare “The US is now the enemy of the West.”
Munich Forgotten: 2007
Europeans’ Munich analogy, however, has been inconsistent at best. A visible blind spot in the European narrative is the 43rd MSC in 2007, where Putin—the first Russian leader to address this most important transatlantic security community—surprised his audience with warnings against a “pernicious” and “unacceptable” “unipolar world” in which the “hyper use of force … is plunging the world into an abyss of permanent conflicts.”
Putin’s 2007 address was his first public warning against NATO’s decade-long probing and push to the East. Over the next 15 years, his repeated warnings were dismissed as manipulative and imperialistic.
Putin’s “about-face” in Munich 2007, therefore, should not be a surprise for the West. Even as Russia’s acting president in early 2000, Putin made it explicit that Russia had “been constantly voicing our opposition to NATO’s eastward expansion.” The West understood the gravity of Ukraine as a redline for Russia but chose to ignore Moscow’s warning, observed Fyodor A. Lukyanov recently.
What West’s hubris overlooked was not only Russia’s security concerns, but also warnings by its own strategists. Two years before George Kennan’s 1997 “fateful error” warning about NATO expansion, Biden’s future CIA director, William Burns, then a US diplomat in Moscow, cabled to Washington that “hostility to early NATO expansion is almost universally felt across the domestic political spectrum here.” And a year after Putin’s 2007 Munich warning, Burns reiterated to then-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that “Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all redlines for the Russian elite (not just Putin).” Shortly after the 2014 Crimea crisis, Henry Kissinger, too, cautioned that Ukraine’s survival and thriving must be based on its neutrality as a “bridge,” not a battlefield, between Russia and the West.
From Moscow, with “Love” …
Beyond Putin’s 2007 Munich speech, the biggest hole in the West’s collective amnesia is Russia’s repeated attempts at rapprochement with the West dating back to the “good-old days” of “Gorbamania.” Following the 1987 INF Treaty, the Soviet leader charmed Europeans with many unilateral moves (Soviet withdrawal from Eastern Europe, Afghanistan, etc.), only to be reciprocated with a Nobel Peace Prize and a “not-one-inch” eastward promise. For this lip service regarding NATO expansion, Gorbachev did not even bother to follow Reagan’s “trust-but-verify” maxim, which, ironically, is a Russian proverb (доверяй, но проверяй).
Yeltsin never regained Gorbachev-style glamor in the West despite his bold Westernization moves (Shock Therapy, e.g.) and intention to be West’s “allies, not as mere partners” in foreign policy. He even sought in writing to join NATO ten days before the official Soviet demise at the end of 1991. The collective West, however, was willing to offer Russia only a symbolic role in European security vis-à-vis Russia’s desire for a direct say in NATO decisions. Meanwhile, Moscow became increasingly sensitive and irritated about NATO’s direct and indirect role in the continuous fragmentation and frictions both in Russia and its vicinity: the Bosnia War in 1992-95, the Chechnya War of 1994-95, and the Kosovo War (1998-99), culminating in NATO’s first major expansion (Czech Republic, Hungary, and Poland) in March 1999. Yeltsin was so upset with the West that he chose Beijing to remind the West that Russia was still a nuclear power to be respected.
Perhaps more than any of his predecessors, Vladimir Putin tried to inject some sense of normalcy and sanity for Russian relations with the West in the age of “unipolar moment.” For this goal, he frequented European capitals while telling BBC that “Russia is a part of European culture,” and was not isolated from “the civilized world.” As a result, a few months after Putin’s first presidency, Russia effectively rid itself of the Yeltsinian shadow of being either the West’s “yes-man” or a “rogue” nuclear power to be feared. For this, an influential German commentator went as far as to describe Putin as doing “what Yeltsin and Gorbachev failed to do, and that anchors Russia firmly in the European house.”
The ultimate goal of Putin’s westward tilt was to reverse the rapidly deteriorating relations with Washington following Bush’s expulsion of 50 Russian diplomats in March 2001. Twice in three months before 9/11—June 16 and then September 9—Putin warned Bush of the danger of Islamic fundamentalist-bred terrorism in the post-Soviet space and Central Asia. Emerging from his first summit with Putin in Slovenia in June 2001, Bush claimed that he was able to see the soul in Putin’s eyes because Putin was “an honest, straightforward man.” Shortly after the 9/11 attacks, Putin was the first foreign leader to pledge support, which was quickly followed by intel sharing for and logistic assistance to the US’ Afghan War. At that moment, Condoleezza Rice “realized that the Cold War was really over.” (Stent, 2015, 61-64).
The Bush-Putin “honeymoon,” however, soon ran out of steam. A month after the November 2001 Crawford summit, Bush announced the ABM withdrawal. This was quickly followed by Bush’s “pre-emptive strike doctrine” (June 2002), the “Freedom Agenda” (January 2003) for color revolutions, and the Iraq invasion (March 2023). Then came the single largest NATO expansion of seven new members in March 2004 (Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia). Meanwhile, “intensified dialogues” for Ukraine and Georgia’s memberships were progressing.
The path to a showdown in Ukraine was wide open.
Munich Forever?
Fast forward to the 61st MSC. The world has changed so much, and yet so little. So much because the Ukraine war now becomes the largest and most destructive conventional war in Europe since 1945. So little because Europeans still insist on their innocence after NATO’s three more expansions (2009, 2017, and 2020) between Putin’s 2007 “threat” and Russia’s “unprovoked attack” on Ukraine since 2022. Meanwhile, the newest target of the timeless Munich analogy is US President Trump for his is “senseless capitulation to Putin … and betrayal of Ukraine.”
The end of the Soviet constraints in the post-Cold War decades, meanwhile, injected a powerful aphrodisiac to the Munich analogy, which in turn shapes the West’s moral absolutism and missionary impulse into a fateful solipsism—the inability even to conceive another way of looking at the world (Kissinger, 2000, p. 247). Hence the forever wars waged by the collective West, leaving a vast wreckage of failed states, floods of refugees, and explosive growth of extremists and terrorists from Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, and now to Ukraine and beyond.
US President Trump, for all of his eccentricities, is unplugging the war party for an immediate ceasefire in Ukraine. It remains to be seen if this constitutes a final reckoning by a Nobel Peace Prize aspirant. Trump is nonetheless brutally honest about an unwinnable war against the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.
The Future: Multiploidization to Where?
The 61st MSC centers on “multipolarization.” While it marks a shift from the pessimistic «Lose-Lose» theme of 2024, the 2025 document remains deeply Eurocentric, viewing with «mixed feelings» the rise of new power centers outside the traditional West. Even more unsettling to European observers, these non-Western «autocracies» appear «optimistic»—both about themselves and the emerging multipolar order. Europeans’ “new speak” of multilatarism, therefore, barely hides Europe’s reluctant drift toward a rather uncomfortable geopolitical isolation, as Washington increasingly «abdicates its historical role as Europe’s security guarantor.»
Yet, multipolarization is no panacea for Europe. Before and after the 1938 Munich Agreement, multiple European powers vied for supremacy both within the continent and beyond. The “Munich betrayal” was merely a chapter in the “twenty-year intermission” between WWI and WWII. In a broader historical perspective, intra-European militarized rivalry was the whole mark of the rise of the old West with non-stop wars, as noted by historian Michael Howard: from the wars of medieval knights to mercenary conflicts funded by royals, from merchants’ profit-driven imperialist ventures to revolutionaries’ passion for liberty, leading ultimately to the total wars of the 20th century. Europe, in a nutshell, was the source of “all tragedies in the world over the past 500 years,” remarked Russian Foreign Minister Lavrov recently.
Ironically, it was the return of Russia and America—two offshoots of European civilization—in 1945 that finally arrested Europe’s centuries-long cycle of violence, leading to what John Gaddis termed “the long peace” (the Cold War). Now Europe finds itself in an uncomfortable position of growing strategic isolation—or, alternatively, newfound freedom—caught between two most powerful and unfriendly nuclear powers. It is simply bizarre to see Europe, despite its embracing multilateralism in words, is pouring money, munitions, and moral support into a war still justified by a historicist freak of its own making—the Munich analogy.
The world, however, is bigger and far more complex than the Western perspective allows. Beyond the toxic mix of the Munich analogy and West’s survival-of-the-fittest Social Darwinism, the Global South envisions a different path and dynamics for the emerging multipolarism. From the start, the Global South has refused to take sides in the Ukraine war—viewing it as a conflict of, by, and for the West. At the 61st MSC, Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi called for an “orderly and equal multipolar world” in which China would serve as a stabilizing and constructive force amid growing global uncertainty and division.
Moscow has yet to respond to Rubio’s take-it-or-leave-it public posturing on the proposed 30-day ceasefire. Even in the best-case scenario, this may only be the beginning of a long and complex path toward a genuine and lasting peace. It is time for Europe to stop digging the Munich trap and engage with the peace initiatives led by the Global South. Beyond that, steps are being taken toward a multipolar world for genuine security, development, and civilizational coexistence for all, including the West.
