Munich Security Conference 2026: the Valentine’s Day That Feels Like an Audit

The Munich Security Conference is back: polished rooms, tight schedules, and corridor conversations that often matter more than the press conferences. It also happens to fall on Valentine’s weekend, an awkwardly perfect scenery for a heteroclite alliance that is quietly asking the same question every couple eventually must: does the love still work, or is the relationship merely running on habit? In security policy, ‘commitment issues’ are measured in capabilities, not flowers, and Europe must choose between relying on U.S. reassurance and building the capacity to stand on its own.

MSC 2026 runs February 13-15 at the Hotel Bayerischer Hof and Rosewood Munich. The organisers have chosen unusually blunt language, warning of an era of “wrecking-ball politics,” a world in which political actors gain ground by breaking rules rather than repairing them. Behind the slogan sits a plain question: how reliable is the West’s security architecture when trust is fraying from within?

That tension is felt first in the transatlantic relationship. Wolfgang Ischinger, the conference chair, has described it as a “considerable crisis of trust and credibility.” And yet the United States is turning up in force: Secretary of State Marco Rubio leads the delegation, with more than 50 members of Congress expected. Rubio is expected to keep to foreign policy and avoid the kind of performative confrontation that upset the previous conference. Even if the tone is calmer, the list of hard subjects does not shrink: security guarantees, defence spending, industrial preferences, trade tensions, and the cultural friction that keeps affecting alliance politics. The alliance is still the alliance, yet it increasingly reads like a contract with clauses rather than vows.

Germany, as host, is trying to act like the hinge. Chancellor Friedrich Merz (CDU) opens the conference and plans meetings with Rubio, China’s foreign minister Wang Yi, and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky. It is choreography with intent: Berlin placing itself at the junction of transatlantic nerves, Chinese leverage, and European war planning. Friedrich Merz loses ground on home affairs, yet he wants at least to save a profile as an international broker. Merz’s wider argument is that Europe’s security posture is built on its economic base. He is aligning with Mario Draghi’s competitiveness blueprint, loosening Germany’s debt brake to fund defence and infrastructure, and building a reform-minded partnership with Italy’s Giorgia Meloni. It is a sober message: security is ultimately paid for in growth, fiscal space, and industrial capacity.

Ukraine will dominate Munich’s agenda precisely because Munich is not the negotiating table. It is the pre-brief. Zelensky said Washington wants a path to end the large-scale hostilities before summer and is proposing another round of talks in Miami. That makes Munich the moment when allies try to align language before they align action. Rubio’s heavy presence, set against Ischinger’s “crisis of trust,” also reads as a stress test: if U.S. support becomes more explicitly conditional, can Europe carry more of the military, financial, and industrial load without hesitating? The same dynamic turns Munich into a marketplace of security guarantees with incompatible definitions. Kyiv is insisting guarantees must come before any deal; Moscow is insisting it needs guarantees too, and both sides are still deadlocked over territory, especially the Donbas. In other words: diplomacy, legitimacy, and allied politics are pulling on the same rope at the same time.

China enters Munich through a corridor meeting, not a grand announcement. Merz meeting Wang Yi is not a ‘reset’; it is risk management in a relationship where economics and security are welded together. Europe wants a channel; China wants leverage. Nobody wants a clean break, and nobody trusts a gentle glide path. The only honest questions are practical ones: how much decoupling is realistic, which dependencies are tolerable, and where Europe can draw lines it can enforce.

The Middle East is another declared focal point. Ischinger has said the implementation of a Gaza peace plan will be high on the agenda, with high-level delegations expected from “practically all the actors in the region.” He has also acknowledged, with unusual candour, that Europe has largely been sidelined and has not played a meaningful role in the conflict. Iran underlines how political the invitation list has become: the conference rescinded its invitation to Iran’s foreign minister after a crackdown on protests, with Germany opposing Iranian participation. In Munich, who is in the room is a signal, and who is not is a signal too.

Outside the hotels, the tense atmosphere is visible. German reporting says police are deploying extensive measures, and large demonstrations are expected, including a major rally focused on human rights in Iran. It is an old Munich contrast between security elites inside and mobilised publics outside, but it feels sharper now because patience with empty language is thinning.

MSC 2026 will not ‘fix’ the international order this St Valentine’s weekend. It will do something more revealing: show whether Europe is willing to fund and build strategic seriousness while managing a United States that remains indispensable but no longer feels automatic. Europe can ask for reassurance. Or it can reduce the need for it. Munich, at its best, is where leaders stop confusing those two options.