Russia’s war in Ukraine started long before February 2022

Awhole year has passed since Russia launched its invasion into Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022, a move that has since been recognized as a political *Zeitenwende* (watershed). War uproots our sense of time, and time has passed both quickly and painstakingly slowly since February 2022. Amid images of Russian war atrocities in Irpin, Bucha, Mariupol and elsewhere, time seems to have …

The Munich Security Conference (MSC) is a unique forum for debating international security policy. Every year, numerous heads of state and government come together to discuss openly and constructively the world’s most pressing security concerns.

A less well-known fact is that, since 2018, the MSC has also been bringing together heads of intelligence services for an exchange of ideas and for dialogue with decision-makers and government officials. At the MSC, …

Dear readers of The Security Times, dear speakers, participants, partners and supporters of the MSC,

At the invitation of publisher Detlef Prinz, I have stepped into the very big shoes of Ted Sommer (see page 27), whose passing last year we continue to mourn.

Under Ted’s leadership, The Security Times developed into a highly useful source of information and inspiration for all those present at our annual flagship Munich Security …

The threat posed by right-wing forces across the globe is as real as it was 100 years ago

Two of the key hopes that emerged from the epoch-shifting Zeitenwende of 1989 have become mere illusions: The first involved hopes of a peace dividend generated by the end of the East-West conflict, and the second involved hopes of a deepened democratization across global society. As we now know, the number of …

The UK’s role in international security – doing more to understand and inhibit aggression

The arrival of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in London on Feb. 8 was a demonstration of the leading role that the UK has played in Europe’s support for Ukraine and the international resistance to an expansionist Russia. The UK’s main partners in Europe have tended to find themselves led – sometimes reluctantly – by a committed …

Imagining that US and Chinese mutual understanding can allow all sides to flourish

For the first time in decades, the citizens of the world are confronting the reality that the prospect of crisis, confrontation and war between the global superpowers is in fact conceivable. Even five years ago, the notion of the United States and China stumbling into military conflict seemed absurd given the depth and breadth of engagement across …

European security a year into the Russian invasion of Ukraine

Almost a year has passed since Russia invaded Ukraine. As leaders convene at this year’s Munich Security Conference, it is a good moment to reflect on what we have achieved and learned as Europeans in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and what challenges lie ahead for the security of our continent.

In February of last year, days before …

The world is at a turning point. Or so they say

A growing chorus of analysts, investors and policymakers claim that much like World War I and the 1918 influenza pandemic brought an end to the first great era of globalization, the combination of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Covid-19, simmering populism and geopolitical competition between the United States and China – or, as historian Adam Tooze calls it, the “polycrisis” …

A new index tracks accountability in the Age of Impunity

The evidence from around the world is that the powerful are becoming more powerful, and less accountable. As Moises Naim says at the beginning of his brilliant book The Revenge of Power: “What is this new foe that threatens our freedom, our prosperity, even our survival as democratic societies? The answer is power, in a malignant new form.”

The central …

After a year of lumbering through Europe’s worst security crisis since 1945, the German chancellor’s foreign and defense policy still lacks speed, direction and determination

Germany does the most!” This is the definition of “Scholzing” that German Chancellor Olaf Scholz would prefer become the broadly accepted one. It is rather at odds with the definition provided by the person who made the term popular in the first place, Oxford historian …