Munich Security Conference

• 1. Introduction

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  The Munich Security Conference began in 1963 with about 60 people crowded into a room, among them a young Helmut Schmidt and an even younger Henry Kissinger. The man who gathered them was Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzin, a resistance fighter who had survived the failed plot against Hitler. He believed the world needed a place where adversaries could talk before conflicts turned into wars. What he built in Munich would grow into something he likely never imagined: a gathering that by the early 21st century draws roughly 800 senior figures from more than 100 countries every February. How did a modest West German meeting become the world's largest international security conference? And what happens when the most powerful people on earth sit in the same room and still cannot agree?

• 2. Founding Vision

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  Von Kleist-Schmenzin came from the Stauffenberg circle, the network of officers and civilians who attempted to assassinate Hitler on the 20th of July 1944. That experience shaped his conviction: military conflict at the scale of the Second World War had to be made impossible through continuous dialogue. His conference, originally called the Internationale Wehrkundebegegnung, was deliberately private and deliberately informal. No binding resolutions, no joint communiques, no government mandate. It was a space for frank conversation, and that informality turned out to be its greatest asset. Von Kleist led the meetings from 1963 until 1998, a span of 35 years, stepping back only when age forced his hand. His departure was, in fact, one of only three times the conference was canceled outright: once in 1965 due to a scheduling shift, once in 1991 because of the First Gulf War, and once in 1997 because von Kleist himself was retiring. Without its founder, there was temporarily no conference at all.

• 3. Growth and Transformation

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  Horst Teltschik, a politician and business manager from the CDU, took the reins from 1998 until 2008 and moved quickly to expand the conference's geographic scope. Under his leadership the 1999 gathering opened its doors to political, military, and business leaders from Central and Eastern Europe, as well as India, Japan, South Korea, and the People's Republic of China. That widening of the invitation list was a deliberate signal: the conference was no longer a purely transatlantic affair. The diplomat Wolfgang Ischinger succeeded Teltschik in 2008 and went further still, formalizing the organization by establishing the Munich Security Conference GmbH as a non-profit company in 2011. By the time Ischinger stepped back in February 2022, the conference's annual funding had grown from less than one million euros of public money in 2008 to roughly ten million euros, now drawn mostly from corporate sources. In 2018 the company was folded into the MSC Foundation, backed by contributions from the German government and other large donors. Christoph Heusgen took over from Ischinger in 2022, and in October 2024, former NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg was named as the incoming chairman starting in 2025.

• 4. The Hotel at the Center

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  Hotel Bayerischer Hof in Munich is where most of the main action unfolds each February. At the 53rd conference in 2017, the largest to that point, the hotel hosted 680 participants, including 30 heads of state and government, nearly 60 representatives of international organizations, 65 top business leaders, and 700 accredited journalists. Beyond the main stage speeches, participants held 1,350 bilateral meetings on the sidelines. The building effectively becomes a temporary capital of international diplomacy. The 2022 conference illustrated just how charged that atmosphere can become: held just days before Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, it was the occasion on which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy warned Western nations directly about Moscow's intentions, invoking the 1994 Budapest Memorandum under which Ukraine had surrendered the world's third-largest nuclear arsenal in exchange for security guarantees. Five days after that speech, Russian forces crossed the border.

• 5. Moments That Defined Eras

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  Joschka Fischer, Germany's Foreign Minister, looked across the table at U.S. officials at the 39th conference in 2003 and said "Excuse me, I am not convinced" when pressed on the case for war in Iraq. That sentence became one of the most quoted moments in the conference's history. In 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a speech in Munich that put Western audiences on notice about Moscow's intentions; the conference has since published that speech as part of its Selected Key Speeches series. At the 45th conference in February 2009, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden attended alongside French President Nicolas Sarkozy, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk, and Afghan President Hamid Karzai. At the 47th gathering in February 2011, Russia's Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton exchanged instruments of ratification for the New START Treaty on the conference's sidelines, bringing that arms-reduction agreement formally into force. The 2020 conference saw Joe Biden, then a private citizen, promise European leaders that "We will be back" regarding American multilateral engagement. A year later, as U.S. President, he declared at the virtual 2021 edition that "America is back".

• 6. Awards and the Next Generation

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  Since 2009, the Ewald von Kleist Award has been given to individuals who made exceptional contributions to peace and conflict resolution. Laureates receive a medal inscribed with the phrase "Peace through Dialogue". Henry Kissinger, one of the 60 original attendees back in 1963, was the first recipient. Subsequent winners included Javier Solana de Madariaga in 2010, John McCain in 2018, Alexis Tsipras and Zoran Zaev together in 2019, the United Nations in 2020, Angela Merkel in 2021, Jens Stoltenberg in 2022, Finland and Sweden jointly in 2023, and Mia Amor Mottley alongside John F. Kerry in 2024. Beginning in 2019, the John McCain Dissertation Award has honored up to two political science dissertations each year focused on transatlantic relations, carrying a prize of up to 10,000 euros. The Munich Young Leaders program, first launched in 2009 in cooperation with the Korber Foundation, runs parallel to the main conference each year to bring the next generation of decision-makers directly into the proceedings.

• 7. When the Room Divides

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  At the 61st conference in February 2025, U.S. Vice President JD Vance used his speech to accuse the conference's organizers of having excluded lawmakers from populist parties on both the left and the right. He argued that when political leaders represent a significant constituency, dialogue with them is "incumbent upon us". His remarks about free speech in Europe being "in retreat" drew immediate public pushback from German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Opposition Leader Friedrich Merz, Vice Chancellor Robert Habeck, and Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, collectively speaking for three different political parties. Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann of the Free Democratic Party called the speech a "bizarre intellectual bottom". The exchange illustrated a tension the conference has always navigated: it is organized privately, carries no authority to make binding decisions, and yet the words spoken inside Hotel Bayerischer Hof carry political weight far beyond Munich. The conference's motto that year was "multipolarization", which proved an accurate summary of what the room actually looked like.