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. The alliance born to contain Moscow, Beijing, and any other emerging power outside the Western sphere of influence (as was the case with Libya yesterday and is today with the Islamic Republic of Iran) now finds itself relearning conventional deterrence on its own continent. The martial rhetoric poorly masks a more troubling reality: Europe has not become an autonomous strategic hub again; it has reconnected itself to Washington. Vassalage and servility, as never before, are congenital and condescending.

The Conference thus revealed an immutable truth: the West no longer sets the global agenda; it reacts. It no longer dictates the rules; it defends contested norms. The moral centrality invoked since 1945 is now being challenged by powers that denounce Western double standards.

Ukraine, Gaza, Taiwan: the global theater of a hegemonic conflict of attrition

Unambiguously, Munich 2026 attempted to weave together crises into a coherent narrative: Ukraine as a vanguard of democracy, Taiwan as a red line in the Indo-Pacific, Israel as a strategic ally in the Middle East. But this narrative is crumbling under the weight of contradictions.

In Ukraine, the conflict has morphed into a protracted war of attrition. Billions of dollars in American and European military aid have not restored a decisive victory. On the contrary, the proxy war against Russia has stalled, revealing the depletion of Western stockpiles and the fragility of the Western world’s defense industrial chains. While Russia has a 30-year lead in nuclear weaponry over EU countries and a 7-year lead over the US, the Western defense industry, despite announcements of a revitalization in 2023 and 2024, is struggling to keep pace with a high-intensity industrial war. The proclaimed solidarity masks a deeper concern: how long can the West sustain a continental front without exhausting its internal political cohesion?

It is in this context that the parallel between JD Vance’s intervention at the Munich Security Conference in 2025 and Marco Rubio’s in 2026 becomes revealing. The Europeans have finally discovered, too late, that Washington is more of an enemy than an ally.

In 2025, Vance’s speech emphasized burden-sharing and the need for Europe to take greater responsibility for its security, while reaffirming the American commitment to Moscow. The tone was critical but still within the strategic continuity of the transatlantic alliance.

In 2026, with Rubio, the focus shifted. Without announcing a formal break, the intervention placed greater emphasis on American national priorities, systemic competition with China, and caution regarding prolonged commitments. The shift is subtle but structural: America no longer presents itself as the undisputed architect of the European security order, but as an actor recalibrating its commitments in response to a multipolar environment.

This year-on-year contrast reveals a broader shift: Western cohesion no longer rests on strategic certainty, but on a shifting compromise between global imperatives and domestic constraints.

In Gaza, since the October 2023 conflict, US political and military support for Israel in its military operations has exposed another vulnerability and sent shockwaves through the Global South. Accusations of massive violations of international humanitarian law have weakened the West’s moral stance. Furthermore, the 12-day war in 2025 and the escalating tensions since January 2026 have highlighted a series of strategic humiliations inflicted by Iran on the United States and Israel, revealing the limits of Western deterrence in the Middle East. How can one invoke territorial integrity in Ukraine while downplaying the destruction of Gaza? This dissonance was palpable in the corridors of Munich 2026, where numerous non-Western representatives underscored the normative inconsistency.

In the Indo-Pacific, rising tensions around Taiwan, particularly following large-scale Chinese military exercises in 2022 and 2023, present Washington with a strategic dilemma: containing Beijing without triggering a major confrontation. The increased militarization of the South and East China Seas is transforming the region into the epicenter of the 21st century.

Munich 2026 thus confirmed a reality: the West is simultaneously engaged on several strategic fronts, without any overwhelming superiority. The image of a superpower capable of projecting its will without constraint belongs to the past. The proliferation of crises reveals not strength, but dispersion.

And in this strategic stretching, the speech given in Munich – whether assured or cautious – betrays less a mastery than a concern: that of a leadership confronted with the reality of a world that no longer belongs exclusively to it.

Forgotten wars and the fracture of the Global South: the silent erosion of hegemony

Munich’s implicit arrogance lies in its blind spot. While Ukraine monopolizes attention, the forgotten wars of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean remain relegated to the margins. Conflicts in the Sahel, chronic instability in Haiti, persistent tensions in Ethiopia, crises in Myanmar: these theaters illustrate a disturbing truth.

For a large part of the Global South, the Munich Conference symbolizes a Western strategic club more concerned with defending its order than with the equitable reform of the international system. The expansion of sanctions, the extraterritoriality of the dollar, and the selective application of international law are perceived as instruments of power rather than as universal principles.

Since 1945, the West has presented its leadership as a global public good. By 2026, this narrative is cracking. The rise of the expanded BRICS, the diversification of strategic partnerships, and the refusal of many states to automatically align themselves with Washington reflect a profound transformation.

Munich 2026 was not a triumphant summit, but a symposium of self-justification. The rhetoric of “democratic resilience” and “rules-based order” rings hollow when those rules appear malleable to suit strategic interests.

Thus, the transatlantic alliance of 1949 was a brilliant response to a bipolar world. In 2026, it struggles to survive in a fragmented, multipolar, technologically redistributionist, and morally contested world. Western hegemony does not collapse in a spectacular crash; it erodes, conference after conference, crisis after crisis.

This summit may go down in history not as a moment of renewal, but as the moment when the West became aware, behind the diplomatic applause, that the center of gravity of the world has already shifted.

It is therefore clear that behind the rhetoric of transatlantic solidarity and the ritual invocation of 1945, a reality is emerging: the strategic architecture resulting from the Second World War no longer corresponds to the morphology of world power.

The transatlantic alliance, designed to contain a single adversary in a bipolar world, now faces a plurality of centers of gravity, a widespread challenge to established norms, and an irreversible technological redistribution. Ukraine reveals the industrial and political limits of Western power projection; Gaza exposes the moral fragility of a selective universalist discourse; the Indo-Pacific reminds us that strategic competition is no longer played out in Brussels or Washington, much less in London, but in the straits and supply chains.

The disturbing truth that Munich 2026 barely hinted at is this: the West can no longer govern the world as if it were its sole architect. It must choose between persisting in the rigid defense of an order it no longer fully controls or accepting the negotiation of a new, more pluralistic, less hierarchical, and more demanding equilibrium.

The emerging opening is neither apocalyptic nor euphoric. It is transformative. If 1945 was the founding act of a hegemony, 2026 could be the year in which the preamble to a post-hegemonic world is written. The question is no longer whether the West can maintain its primacy intact; it is whether it will be able to transform its power into adaptability. For history, indifferent to strategic nostalgia, always moves toward those who know how to read its fault lines before they become irreversible fault lines.

Mohamed Lamine KABA, Expert in the geopolitics of governance and regional integration, Institute of Governance, Human and Social Sciences, Pan-African University

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