World in Danger. Wolfgang Ischinger
be achieved only through the deployment of military force.
My first day in Washington, D.C., as the new German ambassador to Washington was September 11, 2001. Before I even figured out the telephone system, my staff and I had to provide assistance to the families of the German victims of the terrorist attacks, while at the same time organizing crisis communications between my own government and the White House. In so doing, however, I also experienced the extraordinary generosity of the German population in this time of need. Within just a few weeks, Germans donated many millions of dollars, which I was later able to present to the U.S. Department of Defense for the families of the victims of the attack on the Pentagon. The U.S. general who accepted the check was impressed, stating that he had never before received such a large donation from abroad.
As the ambassador in London, I was congratulated by complete strangers in 2006 for the World Cup’s “fairy tale summer”—a soccer tournament that was so joyful and peaceful that the word “Germany” no longer made the British think of the trinity of Hitler, the war, and the kaiser.
And as chairman of the Munich Security Conference since 2008, I have encountered so many leaders from politics, business, and civil society searching for new solutions and ideas to make this world a better place.
The English language uses the expression “fog of war” to express the fact that even the best made plans are worthless in times of war, because the actual events remain obscured by surprises, imponderables, and uncertainty. Not even commanders can maintain a complete overview, yet they have to make weighty decisions even when they can no longer see beyond the hand in front of their face.
Yet over and again, I have experienced that conflicts can actually be resolved even from within the fog—that trust and optimism can replace hate and desperation, and that peace is possible.
The path to peace can be found. Sometimes we just have to look a very long time to find it. That is why good foreign policy also requires tenacity and endurance—we like to speak of “strategic patience” in such cases. And, sometimes the journey is the destination.
FIVE REASONS WHY PEACE AND STABILITY ARE SO DIFFICULT TO SECURE TODAY
So, what is it that makes peace and stability so difficult to achieve? Let us try to get to the bottom of this problem: It is not a mono-causal explanation we are dealing with, of course, but a whole bundle of causes and developments. I would like to briefly present five of these:
The Epochal Break in Power Politics
The unipolar world of the U.S. hegemony that began in 1990 is coming to an end. The next epoch will be characterized, above all, by the rise of China—and thus by a relative power shift away from the United States (and Europe) toward countries outside the traditional West. But extensive power shifts also carry the risk of new crises and conflicts. After all, ascending powers have their own ideas about how the international order is to be shaped—and they may well contradict the ideas propagated by the previous great powers. What we are dealing with here is also known as Thucydides’s trap.
The ancient Greek historian had observed in the tensions between Sparta and Athens that the rise of new powers rarely proceeds peacefully. This raises a question: Can the values of the West, and the institutions that still protect and support the liberal world order it founded, survive in the long term? Or is a new world order emerging—an alternative to the Western order we have known? The disconcertion is palpable, and it is growing. It is further magnified by the fact that the classic “policeman of the world,” who had provided for a semblance of order, has withdrawn: “America First,” the political slogan of the Trump administration, means that Washington no longer feels responsible for global governance, international institutions, and global rules. But if the United States is no longer willing to take on this role, who should or can? This question frequently surfaced during discussions at the 2019 Munich Security Conference and was a core concern raised in our Munich Security Report 2019. In it, we drew the disconcerting conclusion that “some of the candidates for an increased role as guardians of the liberal order are willing but incapable, others are at least moderately capable but unwilling or unable to bring their capabilities to the fore.”8
The Loss of Truth and Trust
One problem is that trust between governments—especially among the most powerful of them—is virtually gone. And it is very, very difficult to rebuild trust once it has been destroyed. In this sense, relationships between states are not so different from a marriage. What makes the situation all the more precarious is that we are observing an alarming loss of trust on all sorts of levels in recent years.
For starters, today we often cannot distinguish between fact and fake. What is truth, and what is propaganda? This is not new in the history of the world; as Aeschylus said, the first casualty of war is truth. But it now seems to apply in times of peace as well. Citizens, like governments, are bombarded with information to such a degree that it is often impossible, or at least difficult, to ascertain what is true.
In the battle of ideas, everyone is adamant about their own “facts.” This is an essential element in our world of increasing uncertainty.
Trust is also being undermined by the fact that Russia and others are deploying the latest technologies in an effort to manipulate democratic means of shaping public opinion in Western societies. We can track this especially in the debate about the role of Russian hackers and social media campaigns in the lead-up to presidential elections in the United States. But in the past year, the Chinese also came under fire for very aggressive interference in politics, universities, and media in Western democracies. Interventions in the freedom of expression are especially problematic in this regard—for instance, when Chinese media in foreign countries are “brought into line” in the hopes of restricting critical debates on human rights violations in China or on the assertion of Chinese territorial claims. In Australia, massive Chinese donations were exposed, which had been funneled to political parties and individual politicians who subsequently expressed very favorable opinions about China.
Thus it may be difficult to consider Xi Jinping’s China or Putin’s Russia a reliable partner. But it does not mean that we should not work together with Beijing and Moscow where possible.
What makes the situation especially dangerous in the case of Russia is the combination of two factors: the current crises in which both Russia and the West are involved (first and foremost in Ukraine and in Syria, but also in Yemen and elsewhere) and the loss of political trust, which has resulted, for instance, in today’s almost complete absence of contacts between the Russian General Staff and the Pentagon. These days it is a major geopolitical event when the Russian chief of the General Staff meets with his American counterpart. In the Clinton and Obama eras, there were multiple communication channels between various levels of Western and Russian military and civilian leadership and command headquarters. Everyone knew their counterpart and who to call in order to clear up any misunderstandings. No one knows with any certainty who to call any more. The two sides barely know each other.
Yet this does not only concern the question of whether Putin trusts Chancellor Angela Merkel or whether Trump trusts Putin. It is also about whether citizens still trust their institutions. Surveys show that citizens’ trust in their governments to make reasonable decisions has dropped dramatically in the twenty-eight EU member states. This loss in trust is not complete, but it is quite substantial. And this loss of confidence in politics extends all the way down to the local level.
The Loss in Predictive Power
Added to this is a new kind of loss in predictive power, or an inability to anticipate the trajectory or significance of world events. As chairman of the Munich Security Conference, which is attended each year by over 500 decisionmakers from all over the world, I think about which topics to put on the agenda months ahead of time. It is important for us to set the right priorities, but we also want to discuss what will be affecting people in the year to come. I try to accomplish this by spending time beforehand with friends, colleagues, and experts whom I believe to be the most intelligent and experienced people in foreign policy, whether they are from Brussels, Moscow, or Washington, from Berlin, London, or Paris.
In early 2014 the political and civil rights demonstrations on Independence