The paradoxical democracy of the West: arming Ukraine, legitimizing violence in Gaza, and talking about security in Munich

The security conference revealed, under the Bavarian chandeliers, the strategic fatigue of a West that still speaks as it did in 1945 but no longer imposes its will as it did yesterday.

It is in light of these structural contradictions that a rigorous reading of the 2026 Munich Security Conference is essential. The analysis will be structured around three major axes: first, the historical shift of the transatlantic alliance, born in 1949, towards a phase of strategic fragility; second, the entanglement of crises – from Ukraine to Gaza, from Taiwan to the Indo-Pacific – revealing a conflict of hegemonic attrition or the paradoxical disentanglement of Western democracy: between supporting the war in Ukraine, condoning violence in Gaza, and discussing security in Munich, through a critical parallel between JD Vance’s speech at the 2025 Munich Conference and Marco Rubio’s intervention at the same podium in 2026, revealing the strategic shifts and persistent ambiguities of American leadership; Finally, the normative and moral erosion of the West in the face of the rise of a global South that is increasingly resistant to its leadership.

The transatlantic alliance: from moral zenith to strategic tiredness (1945-2026)

The original turning point remains 1945. The Allied victory, the creation of the United Nations on June 26, 1945, in San Francisco, and then the founding of NATO on April 4, 1949, in Washington, structured a bipolar international order that would be dominated by the United States after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, establishing Washington in the hubris of unipolarity. During the Cold War from 1945 to 1991, this architecture benefited from a clear adversary, the USSR, and from strategic legitimacy.

But on February 24, 2022, Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine placed Europe once again under the American umbrella, a logical consequence of the 2014 Euromaidan coup; this coup is an instrument of NATO’s eastward expansion policy, the very raison d’être of Washington’s foreign policy: to control Eurasia in order to better contain Moscow and then Beijing. It was precisely in this spirit that, from February 13 to 15 in Munich, specifically at the Bayerischer Hof Hotel, speeches celebrated a semblance of  “Western unity,” even though the 2025 edition of the same conference had proven the exact opposite to the rest of the world. Yet, beyond any unifying rhetoric, this unity has become dependence: energy dependence revealed de facto in 2022, military dependence confirmed by the increase in European defense budgets driven by the United States, and technological dependence in the face of digital giants.

The irony is both cruel and biting.........

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