Munich

Monday

Lisa Haseldine

The Democratic primary in Munich

While all eyes and ears at the Munich security conference will be on US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Saturday, it was America’s Democrats who were able to enjoy their moment in the spotlight on Friday. The party was out in force: Californian governor Gavin Newsom, member of Congress Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer were among the high-profile party delegates on panels at the Bayerischer Hof hotel, where the conference is held. Campaigning for the next Democratic party presidential primary isn’t expected to kick off in earnest for another year.

AOC
energy munich
Dominic Green

Is this Biden’s Munich moment?

When it is 1938 in Washington, it is already past midnight in Moscow. The clock is ticking and the map of Europe is being redrawn, but this is not a Munich moment. We are now past that, and past the time when the leader of a Western democracy might have the honesty to admit to his public, as Neville Chamberlain did in 1938, that he doesn’t want to fight a war over “a quarrel in a faraway country between people of which we know little.” The shadow of Munich shames and intimidates the leaders of the Western democracies, and not without reason. But if there is a Munich moment in the latest Ukraine crisis, then it happened nearly seven years ago — in 2015, when the Obama administration backed the Minsk II accords and the dismemberment of Ukraine.

Saturday

Lois McLatchie Miller

Vance is right — Britain really has ‘thoughts-and-prayers’ policing

"Free speech, I fear, is in retreat," said Vice President J.D. Vance to an audience of world leaders at a security conference in Munich on Friday, with a rhetorical punch comparable to Reagan's "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" Vance pointed to various censorial "hate speech" policies spewed out from Brussels and across Europe, and to the troubling arrest of a Christian in Sweden who used his freedom of expression to burn a Qur’an. Building to a crescendo, Vance then highlighted the "most concerning" case of Adam Smith-Connor — the British army veteran and father of two who was convicted in November 2024 for praying silently, for a few minutes, on a public space across the road from an abortion facility.

j.d. vance

Monday

Jacob Heilbrunn

Trump says he will let NATO down. How will Kamala Harris respond?

When Donald Trump declared that Russia could do “whatever the hell it wants” to NATO countries, he was espousing his own lifelong credo. Trump has done whatever he pleases for most of his life. It was generous of him to extend the same carte blanche to the Kremlin, which is presumably pleased with his offer but has yet to comment on it publicly.  Once upon a time, conservatives used to raise an eyebrow over the notion over doing whatever the hell you want. They were in a more censorious mode, arguing that this amounted to moral relativism. Now it seems that anything goes.  The old certitudes are gone.

donald trump nato

Wednesday

Christopher Sandford

A hundred years on from the Munich Putsch

There’s a school of thought that says the events in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021 were the great communal wound of Western democracy, an outrage seen around the world when a retired cowboy dared put his boots up on an aide to the speaker of the House’s desk (he later got four-and-a-half years for his trouble), and the commander-in-chief tried to grab the steering wheel from a Secret Service agent to turn his SUV around in the direction of the mob so he could join them. “I did not seek the fight brought to this Capitol, but I will not shrink from it either,” President Biden announced through clenched teeth in a speech delivered just outside the House chamber a year later. “I will stand in this breach. I will defend this nation.

munich putsch

Wednesday

Matt McDonald

Steins and slogan tees at the Helen Oktoberfest

I am a Party City Bavarian: wearing Doc Martens, pulled-up cotton socks, a polyester smock and pair of buttock-hugging lederhosen. Drowning men have more breathing room. My range of motion is limited to a ceremonial waddle. Thankfully, I do not have far to travel — and there is plenty of beer. Allow me to explain: this weekend I took the trip ninety or so miles north of Atlanta to Helen, a small city not far from the North Carolina state line. In the late 1960s, city officials passed a zoning regulation to turn Helen into a replica of a Bavarian alpine town (hey, it was a weird decade). The result is a unique slice of Americana: an Oktoberfest in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains, as Appalachian as it is alpine.

helen oktoberfest georgia

Monday

Leon Hadar

Time to retire the ‘Munich’ analogy?

The Ukraine crisis signaled to Western officials and pundits to once again begin recycling the historical analogy of the 1938 Munich Agreement, which handed Nazi Germany parts of Czechoslovakia in a failed bid to head off major conflict in Europe. This was expected. Such comparisons are usually followed by the predictable warnings about the danger of Western “appeasement.” Hence British defense secretary Ben Wallace has recently compared Western diplomatic efforts to head off a Russian invasion of Ukraine to the appeasement of Nazi Germany ahead of World War Two, suggesting that unnamed Western countries were not being tough enough with Moscow.