The world towards the abyss?

The new Security Report on the eve of the Munich Security Conference finds that the world has been very close to the threshold of serious armed conflicts last year.

Security experts are rarely optimistic, security reports are rarely optimistic. That is also true of the new Security Report. The title is as far as the abyss and behind you? The world has been much closer to the threshold of serious armed conflicts last year, writes the chairman of the Security Conference in Munich, Willfang Ischinger, in the introduction near; Ischinger refers to dangerous reports between the US and North Korea, growing rivalry between Saudi Arabia and Iran, high tensions between NATO and Russia in Europe.

U.S. attraction

As in the last three years, the report prepares the grounds for the Munich Security Conference that starts late next week. And somehow the new report follows last year's report. In February 2017, the authors had warned that the US could give up its role as guarantor of international security and that its foreign policy would have uniform or even nationalist orientation. This year, the security report only says: The U.S. is withdrawing from its leading role. It shows little interest in building regional or global institutions establishing rules to shape international relations

The US has said goodbye to politics based on common values. For the U.S. now, they only apply common interest to certain points. This corresponds to a much less interest in diplomacy: the US Foreign Ministry budget has been massively reduced and military spending has increased. The security report cites American foreign policy expert G. John Ikenus, who says: “The most powerful computer in the world is beginning to sabotage the order that it created itself.

Europeans alone?

For Europeans this means, among other things, to care more than ever for their safety. The report recalls a statement by German Chancellor Angela Merkel after US President Trump's visit to Germany in May 2017: The times in which we were able to rely fully on others have to some extent been over.” Now, the Chancellor continued, Europeans must take their fate into their own hands. That also means higher costs for weapons. If all EU countries and Norway also maintain the so-called 2 per cent objective and will truly invest two percent of their economic output in the military, defence spending by 2024 will increase by about 50 percent to about $366 billion. But for the European Army to become more efficient, it must be better connected to a network.

However, the report diagnoses access to a European defence convergence. After all, the 25 states have decided to co-ordinate their EU security and defence policy within the so-called Strategic Co-operation (PESCO). France and Germany want to develop the next generation of fighter aircraft together. And with France's President Emmanuel Macron, the idea of a common European army has won a powerful supporter.

Climate change, conflict, migration

In other ways too, the new security report is a continuation. Last year climate themes and migration had taken on a lot of space. The report laments the fact that the US has withdrawn from the Paris Climate Agreement and that in the recent National Security Strategy it does not consider climate change a security risk.

The report recalls that by 2015 and 2016, 2017 is one of the three hottest years since the beginning of the record of climate data and has been marked by catastrophic storms, droughts, and floods. At the same time, the report draws attention to relations between climate change and conflict. Climate change affects as a force for conflict; it says. ; continuing many long-term armed conflicts has been the main cause of migration, deportations and hunger, notes the report in a chapter dedicated to Africa and migration.