Munich in winter is mildly depressing, unlike the traditionally sunny postcards replete with lagerbier and dirndl. The airport is pretty far from the Bayerischer Hof, the venue for the 61st Munich Security Conference and, as history will record, the formal acceptance of the emergence of multipolarity and a declared shift in the grand strategy of the globe’s preponderant great power. 

A few days earlier, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth declared that the U.S. would look to shift the burden of conventional deterrence on to the Europeans and that the days of unlimited NATO expansion, for all practical purposes, are over. Within the next two weeks, European leaders in the largest gathering of national security elites were lectured by the American vice president about how their institutions increasingly resemble those of the Soviet Union. Immediately after, the Ukrainian president, in his top crusading form, bizarrely tried to rally continental Europe against America by calling for a European army to drive out foreign invaders from the continent, and arguing that the U.S. be replaced by Ukraine in an European alliance. 

The U.S. then held a separate meeting with Russia on deconfliction and arranged to turn Ukraine into a modern version of the Belgian Congo—the Ukrainians will hand over their minerals to the U.S. in lieu of the U.S. allowing them to seek a security guarantee from Europe. Germany held an election, and the new leader, Friedrich Merz, advocated for a tripartite nuclear arrangement with the UK and France, echoing calls for a European army and, among some over-excitable social media accounts, an eventual European empire. Not only was talk of imperialism coming back—the article itself was coming back, at such a rapid and disorienting pace that it almost felt as if the Earth’s magnetic poles shifted overnight. 

The Uber driver from my hotel to MSC was a woman of advanced age and neurotic habits, whose opening salvo of English reminded me of Ilka Grüning’s Mrs. Leuchtag in Casablanca. We passed a Frauenkirche surrounded by niqab-wearing Balkan women, who crossed the road in large groups purposefully ignoring the green lights. I asked her by Google Translate what she thought of Alice Weidel and the rising fortunes of the Alternativ für Deutschland. After a few minutes of miscomprehension, she explained to me how her country is barely recognizable, and that she and her husband have worked for over forty years and have nothing much to show from the state. Upon further probing, she mentioned that while the Turkish diaspora still somehow work and are mostly “europeanized,” the Albanians, Romanians, and Ukrainians are hogging all the benefits, and that as a strong protest she is planning to vote—for CSU. AfD, for all its growth, has plateaued. Untamed Germany remains politically divided as ever, and the majority of right-wingers are reticent about voting in arch-Prussians who are opposed to NATO and arguably see the U.S. as occupiers.