The 2025 Munich Security Conference (MSC) opened in the shadow of terrorism. On opening day, a disgruntled 24-year-old asylum seeker rammed his car into a crowd at a trade union rally, killing a mother and child and wounding dozens of others. It was a tragic act, but like school shootings in America, sadly routine. Yet, domestic terrorism barely earned a mention at MSC. While the agenda advertised multinational issues such as China, the Middle East, and nuclear multipolarity, the zeitgeist was all Russia-Ukraine.

U.S. Vice President JD Vance came closest to discussing internal threats in remarks that earned opprobrium from most Europeans and an accusatory headline from the BBC—"JD Vance's blast at Europe ignores Ukraine and defence agenda"—which, of course, was his very point. But his criticism focused on cultural threats such as free speech and immigration, losing the opportunity to connect those issues to the security threats they provoke. In 1998, Samuel Huntington labeled "The Clash of Civilizations," where cultural and religious identities would be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world. That clash played out in the Munich attack and hundreds of similar massacres around the world, but not on the dais of the MSC.

The singular focus on great-power competition meant that the internal........

© Newsweek