Munich, 14–16 February. The Bayerischer Hof has been hosting the Munich Security Conference since the Cold War, and its ballroom has weathered a lot of uncomfortable moments — Vladimir Putin’s 2007 speech about a unipolar world, the 2014 aftermath of Crimea, the wartime editions of 2022, 2023 and 2024. What happened at MSC 2025 was different in character. The transatlantic settlement did not just wobble in Munich this year. It was pushed, in public, from the podium, by the sitting Vice President of the United States.
US Vice President JD Vance’s Friday address to European heads of state, defence ministers and foreign policy elites will be remembered as the moment the second Trump administration told the room, without diplomatic euphemism, that its principal quarrel with Europe was not Russia. Vance’s speech, and the tightly choreographed 40-minute meeting he held afterwards with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, reset the mood of the conference and — more consequentially — reset the mood of European capitals for the year ahead.
Vance’s speech: the free-speech grenade
What was expected: a Vance address that pressed European allies on defence spending, burden sharing, and the terms of any Ukraine settlement. What was delivered: a speech that spent most of its runtime on European free-speech and migration policy, and framed those as the greater threat to the transatlantic relationship than any external adversary. Vance told the room, in effect, that Washington’s problem with Europe was that European governments had lost touch with their own electorates, and that if European democracies could not be trusted to hear their own voters, there was nothing America could do to help them.
The room read this two ways at once. On the substance, the argument attempted to reframe the transatlantic alliance around domestic political values rather than the mutual-defence architecture that has held it together since NATO’s founding. On the diplomacy, it was — to put it as neutrally as possible — the opposite of the standard American opening at MSC. The traditional US address, from Biden’s team as recently as 2024 and from every Obama-era secretary before that, had been reassurance-first: America is committed, Article 5 is intact, we are with you. Vance’s address inverted the format.
Some of what Vance said tracks with policies the Trump administration had already telegraphed — scepticism of European migration policy, sympathy for right-populist parties, an appetite for reducing American underwriting of European security. What made the moment consequential was the venue. He said it at MSC. To the delegations. In person. That choice was the message.
The Vance–Zelensky forty minutes
The bilateral between Vance and Zelensky was short — roughly 40 minutes — and produced no announced concessions in either direction. Zelensky came into the meeting asking for the position he has asked for every month since the Russian invasion: security guarantees, not a ceasefire slogan. He also indicated he would only agree to meet Vladimir Putin in person once a common plan had first been negotiated with President Trump. Vance’s public messaging afterwards emphasised that the US wants a “lasting” peace — a phrase that European diplomats read as the administration’s preferred framing for a settlement that trades territory for a stop to the war.
Nothing here was resolved. That was the point. The two men were performing the fact that the negotiation is now bilateral between Washington and Kyiv, on Washington’s timeline, with Europe reading the readouts afterwards. The Munich meeting formalised that dynamic in front of everybody who mattered.
European backlash: Scholz uses “never again” back at Vance
The European response was, in the words of one senior European diplomat later that weekend, “across-the-board outrage.” Chancellor Olaf Scholz used his own address to answer Vance directly and pointedly. Vance had visited the Dachau concentration camp memorial during the trip and used the phrase “never again.” Scholz took the phrase back off him. The Chancellor argued in Munich that Germany has learned to say “never again” to political parties whose members trivialise Nazi atrocities and chip away at the democratic order — a targeted reference to the AfD, and to Vance’s own signals of sympathy with the party.
Whatever one thinks of the substance of that exchange, the choreography was extraordinary. A sitting German Chancellor lecturing a sitting US Vice President about democratic memory, from the same stage, in the same 48 hours. European foreign ministers who chose their words more carefully — Kaja Kallas for the EU, defence ministers from the Nordic and Baltic states — landed in the same place: what they had just been told by Washington required a European response that could not depend on Washington to complete.
Ukraine’s ask, still on the table: guarantees, not slogans
Stripped of the theatrics, Zelensky’s Munich message was the same message he brought to every capital he visited in early 2025. Ukraine’s problem with any ceasefire framework is not the ceasefire; it is what comes after. Without hard security guarantees — troop presences, air-defence coverage, integrated command relationships, credible reconstitution commitments — a Russian pause becomes a Russian preparation window. The Ukrainian delegation’s language in Munich was more explicit than in previous editions: no deal without guarantees; no guarantees without European industrial follow-through.
The industrial subtext: European defence spending as structural
The MSC 2025 corridor conversation, once you stepped away from the Vance headlines, was overwhelmingly industrial. Munitions capacity. Air-defence interceptors. Long-lead components. Skilled labour. Energetics. Every large European defence contractor — Rheinmetall, MBDA, Nammo, Saab, Thales, Leonardo, Kongsberg — was in Munich. So were the national-armaments directors. The 2% GDP defence-spending floor is now widely acknowledged in European capitals as a floor rather than a ceiling; several countries are already publicly discussing 3% and, in the Nordic and Baltic cases, higher.
The unsaid part: European defence spending is now expected to be structural, not cyclical. That is a very different asset for the industry than a wartime spending pulse. It changes the case for private capital, for M&A, and for greenfield production capacity. The venture-and-growth cohort that has spent the last two years telling limited partners defence tech was worth an allocation had a very well-attended Munich.
AUKUS and the Indo-Pacific in the corridors
Less visible but consequential: the Indo-Pacific delegations at MSC 2025 were larger than in past years, and the AUKUS Pillar 2 conversation — trilateral technology sharing on AI, autonomy, quantum, undersea and hypersonics between the US, UK and Australia — surfaced in more corridor discussions than it did on the mainstage. European interest in adjacent participation, particularly Japanese and Korean, was more openly discussed than in prior editions. The strategic backdrop is straightforward: several European defence programmes are watching the AUKUS technology-transfer regime as a template for what accelerated industrial cooperation between trusted partners can look like.
The Munich Security Report reads darker
The annual Munich Security Report — the conference’s flagship publication — landed with a more sombre framing than in recent years. The report’s argument, put simply, is that the post-Cold-War international order is no longer coasting; it is being actively reshaped. Deterrence, resilience, and strategic autonomy dominated the language. The MSC organisers had, presumably, drafted much of the report before the Vance address. It read afterwards like a much better-timed piece of work than it should have been.
What MSC 2025 actually moved
- The transatlantic settlement has been openly renegotiated. Not quietly, not through channels — from the podium.
- Ukraine negotiations are bilateral US–Ukraine on a US timeline. Europe is now a stakeholder consulted rather than a co-negotiator.
- European defence spending is structural. The 2% floor is a floor. Industry can plan accordingly.
- Air defence and munitions are the top of the procurement stack. Every European land force has the same shopping list.
- AUKUS is a template European delegations are studying. Trusted-partner tech transfer is on the agenda.
Open questions
How does Europe operationalise the strategic autonomy it has been talking about since the mid-2010s — not as a slogan, but as concrete industrial base, procurement, and command architecture? Do the Ukraine negotiations produce a settlement architecture Kyiv can accept, or does the Trump timeline outrun the Ukrainian bottom line? And how much of Vance’s Friday speech becomes durable American policy, versus a rhetorical opening move that gets moderated once the negotiation begins?
Bottom line: Munich 2025 was the year the transatlantic conversation stopped being about reassurance and started being about renegotiation. Europe went home with a to-do list: build the defence industrial base out at wartime tempo, plan for Ukraine outcomes it may not fully control, and stop assuming Washington will supply the moral scaffolding as well as the security one. On all three, the follow-through is now a European problem, not an American one.
