By Jeremy Kinsman

February 9, 2026

This weekend, February 13-15, international security elites will gather again at the elegant Hotel Bayerischer Hof for the annual Munich Security Conference (MSC), which for several decades has been the geopolitical and security counterpart to Davos’ draw on market economies.

The Munich Conference “Report 2026” declares this to be an “inflection” moment in international relations, extending the widely registered shock effect of the now-famous Carney speech at Davos that declared the rules-based world order “ruptured.”

Carney called on like-minded internationalist middle powers still believing in interdependence and cooperation to band together to resist intimidation and threats.

Though he never mentioned the US and its seemingly unhinged president, everybody knew the source and reality of the threat. But in declaring the international order to be “under destruction,” the MSC Report 2026 does name “the president of the US — the country that did more than any other to shape the post-1945 international order” as “now the most prominent of the demolition men.”

A year ago, Munich attendees gathered for signs from the new Trump administration of its expectations and orientation received a blisteringly disdainful attack against Europe from Vice President JD Vance, surfing on a White House worldview meant to intimidate and dominate US allies as much, even more, than US adversaries.

On “Liberation Day”, April 2, 2025, Trump trashed the rules-based system for international trade represented by the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1947) as replaced by the World Trade Organization (1995), unveiling unilateral and destructive tariffs, creating panic among allies and trading partners. Almost all — not Canada — rushed to appease the Trump Administration, often in televised Oval Office submission events with tributary gifts, from Switzerland’s gold bars to PM Starmer’s breast-pocket invitation from King Charles for the US president’s second state visit.

After distancing the U.S. from democratic Ukraine, first by humiliating President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval office, then by prostrating himself for Vladimir Putin at the Anchorage summit, Trump persisted in playing European and other allies, including Canada, through a sequence of set pieces that were passive-aggressive at best, utterly fraudulent at worst.

Along the way, the Administration issued a US National Security Strategy that abandoned a century of U.S. foreign policy and again attacked Europeans for “civilizational erasure” by accepting as immigrants peoples alien to “western values” that struck readers as a white nationalist dog-whistle. It again depicted the European Union as opponent of national sovereignty that is the ostensible lodestar of the MAGA movement.

After a series of flagrantly unilateral interventions, strikes, orders and withdrawals, Trump actually did exert enough pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to obtain a Gaza cease-fire. Five hundred Palestinians have been killed since it was agreed.

Perhaps the last straw for US “allies” was Trump’s express determination to “have” Greenland, “the “easy way or the hard way” — a ludicrous threat that challenged law, custom among allies, and NATO’s very existence. Trump was talked down from his folly because European — and Canadian — allies at last stood firm in absolute opposition.

But the destruction facing attendees in Munich is vast.

In addition to the well-known litany of abandonments, offences and guttings of multilateral institutions and international organizations rationalized by Donald Trump’s personality, there is now the threat of a nuclear Wild West.

Vice President Vance won’t be in Munich, presumably for the same reason Trump didn’t attend the Super Bowl: fear of being booed.

Last week, the 2009 New START Treaty between Russia and the U.S. that further limited nuclear arsenals expired: Trump refused Putin’s offer of a one-year extension. For the first time since 1972, there are no limits on U.S. or Russian nuclear arsenals, or structures, just as Russia and China expand their own military capabilities, prompting a more complex arms race than during the Cold War.

The U.S. plans to expand nuclear MIRV missiles on board its 14 Ohio-class submarines but seems ambivalent over NATO Article 5 commitments to defend NATO allies at all costs. The potential removal of the U.S. nuclear umbrella had helped cap nuclear weapons proliferation. But declining confidence in the U.S. prompts multiple countries to re-consider their own nuclear options.

Among 21st century issues abrading trans-Atlantic relations to be discussed in Munich; the U.S. refuses to accommodate EU perception of need (shared by Canada and Australia) to regulate social networks and internet platforms for content damaging to children or offending anti-hate legislation. The U.S. seems to deem the taming of toxic social networks and digital platforms to be inimical to its autonomous domination of information technologies and material interests.

The Trump administration sees little compatibility with European democracies on values, preferring to weaponize fractious divides of the divisive US cultural agenda. Trump’s Washington scorns the benefits of the EU’s more communitarian social model as reflecting an AOC/Bernie Sanders vision of society, preferring the all-out expansionist quasi-libertarian economic model of Silicon Valley. The EU could indeed inject more dynamism into its economic performance by lessening its regulatory burden, but not at the cost of social protections.

Trump has done the remarkable service to Europeans of strengthening their unity. EU leaders accustomed to concentrating their political energies on unproductive internal battles with populist far-right adversaries now rally together against a set of adverse U.S. events and attitudes.

As a community of 27 member states that pool national sovereignty by compromise, the EU moves slowly. But it conserves a remarkable standard of living and basic comity that most Americans don’t grasp. 75% of Europeans cherish their “European” identities adjacent to their national loyalties.

The EU aligns with Canada on many issues, social, commercial, and values based. When Carney spoke of middle power alignment, he had the Europeans in mind as well as the democracies of the Global South, such as Brazil and India, both of which are proudly independent but also committed to cooperative internationalist outcomes on shared challenges, such as climate. With Japan and many others, the middle-power community commands 40% of global GDP.

But Canada and Europe represent something of a continuing proof of concept of transatlantic continuity, including opportunities to concert for the “NB8” of Nordic and Baltic countries, which share vital Arctic interests.

Notions that Canada could “join” the EU are forgetful of the whole contiguous European theme that was at the origin of the “European project” to “end Europe’s murderous wars forever.”

But if Carney is right (and I think he is) that “Canada is the most European of non-European nations,” Canada and the EU could together imagine an “associate” EU membership. It would not require adopting the regulatory “acquis” of almost 70 years since the Treaty of Rome established in 1957 the first principles of a united Europe of sovereign states, that would disrupt Canadian treaty obligations with the US and Mexico (if they survive).

Nor should Canada emphasize the idea of an over-arching “Alliance of Democracies”, an unsuccessful U.S. neo-conservative project back when U.S. conservatives at least considered the world as something other than a zone to conquer.

We need better balance, and so do the Europeans. Michael Ignatieff aptly described the European dilemma stemming from “disgust at (Trump’s) conduct…They have to distance themselves from Trump, reduce their dependence on American power without giving up on America itself…When Canadians hear themselves referred to as the ’51st state,’ a liberating sense of fury takes hold, only to be balanced by sober awareness of their dependence on the U.S. market.”

We’ll hear from Munich this weekend and beyond what Europeans and some Americans think of all this. Secretary of State Marco Rubio will be the administration’s voice. Vice President Vance won’t be in Munich, presumably for the same reason Trump didn’t attend the Super Bowl: fear of being booed.

Policy Contributing Writer Jeremy Kinsman served as Canada’s ambassador to Russia, high commissioner to the UK, ambassador to Italy and ambassador to the European Union. He also served as minister at the Canadian embassy in Washington. He is a Distinguished Fellow of the Canadian International Council.