A safer world: The 62nd Munich Security Conference (MSC) provided a platform for three days of intensive debates on the world’s most pressing
security challenges. Photo: MSC
If you want to understand the next decade, do not start with summit communiqués. Start with the places where power is stress-tested.
The Munich Security Conference (MSC) has become one of those places: a stage where alliances are renegotiated, red lines are signalled and the boundary between ‘security’ and ‘economy’ is deliberately erased
It produces no treaties but it shapes the operating assumptions that later become treaties, tariffs, sanctions, procurement rules and supply-chain architecture.
For readers unfamiliar with it, the MSC is not a treaty-making summit and it produces no binding resolutions.
It is an annual high-level gathering in Munich, Germany, where heads of state, foreign and defence ministers, military chiefs, intelligence leaders, multilateral organisations and major corporate and technology actors meet to debate security in its modern meaning: war and deterrence, yes, but also energy, migration, cyber, critical minerals, supply chains and the information ecosystem.
Its real function is strategic signalling: leaders use the MSC stage to preview policy shifts, test language, harden or soften positions and build coalitions.
What is said in Munich often becomes action within weeks — in defence budgets, sanctions, export controls, industrial subsidies, procurement rules and diplomatic manoeuvres.
MSC 2026 branded itself ‘Under Destruction’. That framing matters. It is an admission that today’s insecurity is not only conflict by accident inside a stable order but erosion by design: states, proxies, cyber actors and political entrepreneurs willing to break institutions and norms because they believe disorder benefits them.
When destruction becomes a strategy, you get more transactional deals, more conditional guarantees and more coercive economic instruments — export controls, subsidies, sanctions and investment screening — used to discipline behaviour rather than expand prosperity.
This is the context in which the world watched US secretary of state Marco Rubio and China’s foreign minister Wang Yi speak back-to-back in Munich.
Their headline message — ‘we must manage competition’ — was less important than what sat underneath it: a contest over who defines law, whose standards dominate technology and who gets to treat Europe (and the wider world) as an arena rather than an actor.
First, Washington and Beijing are building a ‘container’ around their rivalry. Rubio said it would be ‘geopolitical malpractice’ not to talk to China but added that no one should expect fundamental change.
Translation: dialogue is risk management, not reconciliation. Wang praised the American president’s respect for China, then asked whether ‘all people in the United States share this view’, warning against ‘small, exclusive circles’. Translation: China will talk at the top but it believes coalitions below — export-control clubs, security formats and Taiwan-related partnerships — could still push the relationship toward confrontation. The container is real but it is fragile.
Second, both powers used Munich to reposition Europe. Rubio’s pitch was civilisational: a call to ‘build a new Western century’, framed as a shared heritage that requires tighter unity, sharper borders and more self-defence capacity.
Europe, in that story, is family — but family is expected to follow the house rules. Wang’s pitch was the inverse: treating China as Europe’s ‘rival’ is ‘negative thinking’; Europe’s challenges do not come from China; Europe should not be ‘on the menu’ but ‘at the table’, especially on Russia diplomacy.
This is not generosity. It is a wedge strategy: cultivate European autonomy where it loosens American gatekeeping.
Third, a legitimacy war is underway. Rubio’s critique of universalist ‘rules-based order’ language and his impatience with multilateral venues signal a doctrine of coalition-first governance: use institutions when useful, bypass them when they are constraints.
Wang’s defence of UN-centred multilateralism signals the opposite doctrine: procedural legitimacy, sovereign equality and governance reform aimed at diluting Western dominance.
This is the real contest of the coming decade: not only who has weapons but who owns the architecture that decides what counts as lawful, what counts as security and which standards become mandatory.
President Volodymyr Zelensky’s posture at Munich was clear: peace without durable deterrence is not peace; it is a pause.
Reports of calls for long-term guarantees with multidecade horizons reflect hard learning: if the aggressor’s cost calculus does not change, ceasefires become intervals.
Nato’s message reinforced that Ukraine is central to European credibility. Yet the revealing pattern in Munich was how quickly ‘Ukraine’ discussions collapsed into ‘production’ discussions: ammunition output, air defence, drones, electronic warfare, sustainment and energy resilience.
The war is now inseparable from Europe’s industrial mobilisation problem. In a hard world, production capacity becomes political power.
Europe’s defence pivot is often described as ‘rearmament’. That word misses the point. What Europe is really pursuing is industrial sovereignty: control over supply, export and use restrictions and control over technology and maintenance chains. ‘European preference’ procurement is not moral posturing; it is a control instrument.
A continent that outsources security production eventually outsources strategic choice. Europe is seeking to shift the security value chain away from US-centric dependence and toward European-controlled production and rules.
The Greenland–Arctic dispute that flared on the margins of Munich is a warning of the next theatre: sovereignty stress tests inside alliances.
The Arctic is becoming a composite domain — with shipping lanes, seabed resources, undersea cables, intelligence systems and missile-defence geometry.
If aligned blocs can fracture over resource geography, smaller states should abandon the fantasy that friendships guarantee stability. Interests will increasingly override sentiment.
The ‘hidden macro’ running through all of this is that security is now fused to economics. Migration politics, industrial capacity, trade design, technology stacks and platform governance are treated as security questions.
This fusion has predictable consequences: more coercive economic instruments; more bloc-shaped supply chains; and more pressure on swing states — especially the Global South — to align choices on ports, cables, cloud infrastructure, telecoms, payment systems and critical minerals.
We will not be asked politely to pick a side. We will be nudged through standards, financing terms, insurance costs, procurement eligibility, data localisation expectations and ‘trusted vendor’ regimes.
That is what it means to live in a world where alignment is priced not ideologically but structurally: supply-chain alignment, standards alignment, data alignment, payments alignment and technology alignment.
The question, then, is whether South Africa can convert this moment into leverage rather than vulnerability. Three corridors are visible.
First, defence-industrial inputs and lawful dual-use manufacturing. Europe’s production push will expand demand for specialised metals and alloys, electronics sub-supply chains, testing and certification and maintenance, repair and overhaul ecosystems.
South Africa’s play is not to posture as an arms exporter. It is to enter legal value-chain segments with reliability, traceability and skills in machining, components, calibration, industrial software, secure logistics and standards compliance.
Second, critical minerals plus beneficiation are framed as security. Critical minerals are no longer ‘commodities’; they are strategic dependencies.
South Africa gains bargaining power if beneficiation is positioned as risk reduction: diversified refining, verified traceability, ESG assurance and resilient corridor logistics.
But this requires domestic discipline: energy reliability, port performance, rail throughput and regulatory certainty. In a world under destruction, partners pay premiums for reliability.
Third, ‘trusted infrastructure’ deals. As blocs harden, who runs the cloud, cable, port and telecom stack becomes a security question.
South Africa can offer neutral compliance frameworks, strong data governance and corridor partnerships that are rules-compatible without becoming subordinate.
But neutrality is not declared; it is earned.
For South Africa, the choice is not whether to engage. It is whether we will engage as a node of value or as a zone of risk. Alignment will be priced. The only question is whether we pay with strategy or with surprise.
Faiez Jacobs is a governance reformer, former member of parliament and chief executive of The Transcendance Group. He advises on public-sector capability, economic transformation and strategic resilience in South Africa and the region.