Wolfgang Effenberger

The 58th Munich Security Conference (MSC, described by the German Ministry of Defense as the most important informal security policy meeting in the world) will be held from Feb. 18 to 20 at the Bayerischer Hof Hotel on Promenadenplatz in Munich's Old Town, and will be attended primarily by representatives of Western political celebrities. The MSC is not an official government event. It is hosted by the Munich Security Conference Foundation, a non-profit limited liability company. A large police force has to ensure the safety of the guests and cordons off the area between Marienplatz, Frauenkirche and Odeonsplatz. Demonstrations are inevitable, especially when one considers that only a few kilometers away from Munich, the Air Force Officers' School, located on the barracks grounds in Fürstenfeld, could accommodate, supervise and secure the participants in the best possible way. The costs for the event could be considerably reduced in this way, too.
No, for the rendezvous of political celebrities - U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, U.S. Secretary of State Blinken, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, Ukraine President Volodymyr Selenskyj and representatives of the German government Scholz, Baerbock and Lambrecht - in the Isar metropolis, neither costs nor efforts are spared.
As early as the night of February 17-18, Defense Minister Christine Lambrecht presented her perspective on the topic of "Innovation at Frontlines" at this year's pre-event, Innovation Night, which was introduced in 2018. As today's military conflicts also take place in the digital space, in the future, digital innovation capabilities would determine victory and defeat on the still analog battlefields, she said.(1)
The focus these days is admittedly on the Ukraine crisis and NATO's tensions with Russia. Volodymyr Selenskyj has announced himself for Saturday (Feb. 19) to talk about "Ukraine and the European Security Architecture."(2)
The European Security Architecture was already strapped into a firm framework in Brussels on Feb. 16, 2022. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg's conversation with U.S. Defense Secretary Lloyd J. Austin before the start of the NATO Atlantic Council meeting at the organization's headquarters in Brussels on February 16, 2022, prompted the U.S. military magazine Stars and Stripes to write: "U.S. and NATO see Russia as a persistent threat to Europe and will deploy more combat forces in response."
Plans are said to be underway, for example, to form allied battle groups in central and southeastern Europe to respond to the "new normal" of a persistent Russian threat to the continent. Stoltenberg did not see de-escalation, in part because Russian forces would be increased around Ukraine. In a joint statement, Stoltenberg and Austin pointed out that Russia's actions posed a "serious threat to Euro-Atlantic security." And Stoltenberg made clear, "Russia does not decide who becomes a member of NATO."(3)

The Munich Security Conference has been held annually in Munich since 1963. Between 1963-1992 as the Internationale Wehrkundebegegnung / Münchner Wehrkundetagung, then renamed the Munich Conference on Security Policy, and since 2009 it has operated as the Munich Security Conference.
At the conference from January 31 to February 2, 2014 – during the regime change in Ukraine orchestrated by the West - the then German President Joachim Gauck, Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier and Defense Minister Ursula von der Leyen spoke out in quick succession in favor of Germany becoming involved in the world "earlier, more decisively and more substantially. They had chosen the Munich Security Conference as a forum to send a signal to the international community: The Federal Republic is ready for more responsibility.(4) Starting on February 18, 2014, events in Ukraine escalated, claiming more than 80 lives.(5) After the agreed settlement of the conflict through the efforts of the foreign ministers of France, Poland and Germany - here Steinmeier "shone" with his diplomatic coup(6) - the elected president Yanukovych fled precipitously the same night.

Many see the MSC as a forum supporting the transatlantic agenda for a unipolar world. This, of course, brings opponents of any policy that appears imperial to the streets. In 2017, for example, Eugen Drewermann and Lisa Fitz, in stirring appeals for peace, called for policies that serve peace and opposed the intentions of a conference whose diplomacy is based on mutual threats and war.
Opponents of SIKO see it as a propaganda forum to justify NATO, its billions in arms spending, and its war operations in violation of international law, built on lies and sold to the population as "humanitarian interventions." The demands in 2017 were: An end to the war in Syria, an end to military mobilization against Russia, and an end to wars and regime change operations for more power and supremacy. Western values - freedom, democracy and human rights - are only the cover to achieve more control over raw materials and to secure markets for themselves. Against this background, the demonstrators demand a different, a more peaceful world. Their appeal: we want to be social, sustainable and peaceful. FOR THAT let us stand up! (7)Thus, the call for protest against the Munich "Security Conference" 2022 bears the headline: Stop the war course of the NATO countries(8)

A similar view is held by Scott Ritter, a former U.S. Marine Corps intelligence officer "who served in the former Soviet Union implementing arms control treaties, in the Persian Gulf during Operation Desert Storm, and in Iraq overseeing the disarmament of weapons of mass destruction."
In his seminal February 11, 2020 article, "The Ultimate End of NATO,"(9) he writes that Russia's goal is not to destroy Ukraine. Rather, he says, the goal is to expose NATO's impotence. He also says that the U.S. position has less to do with European security than with the U.S. attempt to capture the European market for itself.
Ritter predicts that in the coming months NATO will be confronted with the reality "that Russia is not attacking anyone and that the current muscle play is not only unnecessary but, worse, unsustainable." In contrast to the unilateral rules that serve only the interests of the United States and small blocs of allied nations, Russia and China seek a "rights-based international order" based on the United Nations Charter."(10)
This Charter is worth recalling here. In Chapter I, "Purposes and Principles," Article 1 sets forth the purposes of the United Nations,(11)

1. to maintain international peace and security and, to this end, to take effective collective measures to prevent and eliminate threats to the peace, to suppress acts of aggression and other breaches of the peace, and to clean up or settle international disputes or situations which might lead to a breach of the peace by peaceful means in accordance with the principles of justice and international law;
2. to develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other appropriate measures for the consolidation of international peace;
3. to bring about international cooperation to solve international problems of an economic, social, cultural and humanitarian character and to promote and consolidate respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms for all without distinction as to race, sex, language or religion;
4. to be a focal point in which the efforts of nations are coordinated to achieve these common goals.

This seminal Article 1 of the Charter seems to have been nothing more than moot for decades now, when the illegal wars since the dissolution of the Soviet Union are remembered. "If the same "defensive" alliance that bombed its ally Belgrade and participated in the overthrow of the Libyan leader," writes Scott Ritter, "seeks the admission of Ukraine and Georgia as members, such actions, from the Russian perspective, can only be viewed as aggressive, offensive-minded measures that are part of a broader anti-Russia campaign."(12)
Russia's claim that NATO's eastward expansion violates Western commitments made after the fall of the Berlin Wall is now supported by a remarkable file discovery from the British National Archives. (13) A meeting of the political directors of the foreign ministries of the United States, Britain, France, and Germany in Bonn on March 6, 1991, addressed the security issues of East European states.
Bonn's representative, Jürgen Chrobog, stated at that time, according to the memo, "We made it clear in the Two Plus Four negotiations that we would not extend NATO beyond the Elbe. We therefore cannot offer NATO membership to Poland and the others."
The British, French and Americans also rejected NATO membership for the Eastern Europeans. U.S. Representative Raymond Seitz said, "We have made it clear to the Soviet Union - at Two Plus Four as well as other talks - that we will take no advantage of Soviet troop withdrawals from Eastern Europe."(14)
However, soon after, the Americans corrected their policy.
 
This Western policy helped to alienate Putin and Germans. On September 25, 2001, Russian President Vladimir Putin had extended his hand in the Bundestag and won the hearts of Germans with his brilliant speech. Today, the relationship is on ice. Why did the West turn down the offered friendship back then and squander the opportunity for peaceful coexistence? Was it the transatlantic agenda that preferred to drive and still wants to drive a wedge between Western Europe and Russia?(15)
If the world does not come to its senses, an almost unimaginable scenario could come true for Europe. The famous German writer Thomas Mann had recognized in his American exile the tendency of the USA "to treat Europe as an economic colony, a military base, a glacis in the future nuclear crusade against Russia, as a piece of the earth which may be antiquarian interesting and worth touring, but about whose complete ruin one will give a damn when the struggle for world domination is on."(16)

Notes

1)https://www.bmvg.de/de/muenchner-sicherheitskonferenz-2022
2)https://www.merkur.de/politik/siko-muenchen-scholz-baerbock-kamala-harris-blinken-ukraine-wolodymyr-selenskyj-91356285.html
3)https://www.stripes.com/theaters/europe/2022-02-16/nato-russia-stoltenberg-europe-ukraine-5042504.html?utm_source=Stars+and+Stripes+Emails&utm_campaign=36e1da19ac-Newsletter+-+Weekly&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0ab8697a7f-36e1da19ac-296504235
4)https://www.bmvg.de/de/themen/informelles-sicherheitspolitisches-treffen-seit-1963-21472
5)Basler Zeitung vom 23. Februar 2014
6)https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article125094196/Der-diplomatische-Coup-des-Frank-Walter-Steinmeier.html
7)Immer wieder anhörenswert:
Eugen Drewermann: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esSPb0FeITM
Lisa Fitz:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=esSPb0FeITMhttps://sicherheitskonferenz.de/Lisa-Fitz-SIKO-18.2.2017-Stachus
8)https://www.attac-netzwerk.de/ag-globalisierung-und-krieg/aufrufe/siko
9)https://consortiumnews.com/2022/02/11/the-ultimate-end-of-nato/
10)Ebd.
11)https://unric.org/de/charta/
12)https://consortiumnews.com/2022/02/11/the-ultimate-end-of-nato/
13) https://www.spiegel.de/ausland/nato-osterweiterung-aktenfund-stuetzt-russische-version-a-1613d467-bd72-4f02-8e16-2cd6d3285295
14) https://www.welt.de/politik/ausland/article236986765/Nato-Osterweiterung-Archivfund-bestaetigt-Sicht-der-Russen.html?source=puerto-reco-2_ABC-V1.B_click_prob_only
15) https://www.mdr.de/geschichte/putin-und-die-deutschen-100.
16) htmlThomas Mann: Deutsche Hörer! Europäische Hörer! Darmstadt 1980, Rückse