The US Wrecking Ball Returns to Munich

As leaders, diplomats and top brass from about 50 countries once again gather at the Munich Security Conference, the world seems upside down — or, as the event’s organizers put it, “under destruction,” as a certain someone takes “bulldozers, wrecking balls, and chainsaws” to what used to be called, however euphemistically, the rules-based international order.

That someone is US President Donald Trump, of course, who increasingly resembles not a leader of the free world but the strongmen he admires in Russia, China and elsewhere. A year ago, his vice president, JD Vance, came to the conference to insult his hosts and warn Western Europeans that the American administration now deems them foes more than friends. By now, that stance has been enshrined in official strategy documents, along with other American policies that amount to, well, wrecking balls.