Angel Jaramillo
At the recent Munich Security Conference, the great powers discussed the delicate balance of peace when everything revolves around the fate of a country halfway between Europe and Russia.
February in Munich, the capital of Bavaria, is still cold. The baroque architecture of many of its buildings is visible amid the snowflakes that still fall from a benevolent sky.
In the elegant but sober Bayerischer Hof hotel, originally conceived by King Ludwig I of Bavaria, the leaders of the world’s most industrialized nations meet every year to discuss global security issues.
The founder of the Munich Security Conference is a figure of grave historical resonance. Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist Schmenzin (1922-2013) came from a distinguished Prussian Pomeranian family, to which belonged, among others, the German poet Heinrich von Kleist and the American jazzwoman Erika von Kleist.
Ewald-Heinrich has a heroic place in the annals of his clan. In January 1944 – he wanted his briefcase full of explosives – he planned a suicide bombing against Hitler. But the moment of truth never came, and the Austrian vagabond would still have one more year to live before he shot himself in the face while Soviet troops were already stalking his bunker.
Ewald-Heinrich had enough of many vicissitudes, among them the founding in 1962 of the International Wehrkundebegegnung, the forerunner of today’s Munich Security Conference. Ewald Heinrich aimed to avoid repeating the terrible experience of World War II when he brought together prominent figures in world politics, such as Helmut Schmidt and Henry Kissinger, for his first meeting.
In its 2023 version, the Conference is marked by one absence. For the second year in a row, the Russian regime headed by Vladimir Putin was absent from the deliberations. The specter of Ukraine haunted the tidy halls of the Bayerischer. As was the case during the Balkan War in the late 1990s, Europe’s security is threatened by what is happening on its own territory. Among other things, Russian soldiers in Ukraine exhibit the historical dilemmas of deep Russia. Putin does not represent the Russian modernity of St. Petersburg, which has always been a window to the West. Nor does he embody the third Rome, the city of Moscow, where the multicolored domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral pretend to scratch the firmament. Instead, the former KGB agent symbolizes the golden horde of the Mongol empire that dominated the Russian steppe until its defeat at the Battle of Kulikovo in 1380.
Genghis Khan’s Mongol plot also encompassed the conquest of the Song dynasty in southern China. The territory of the Mongol pax is today an awakening world. Perhaps that is the meaning of the current Sino-Russian alliance, which, according to U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, involves Beijing’s military aid to Moscow so that Putin can continue his adventure to conquer Kyiv, where the Mongols had their center of power. The round of civilizations is a perpetual movement of blood, iron, and tears.
The regime headed by Xi Jinping is playing into Putin’s hands, both at the UN and in other multilateral concertation mechanisms, by talking about peace plans that are nothing more than projects that would mean, in fact, Moscow’s control of Ukraine.
Everything now revolves around the fate of a country halfway between Europe and Russian civilization. If we listen to Milan Kundera, Western Europe extends to the territories where Catholic Christianity and the Latin alphabet cease to dominate. Beyond that, said the Czech writer, the Orthodox Church and the Cyrillic alphabet extend: to the Asian orb. Under this taxonomy, Ukraine is not Europe.
Given this, it should be said that the identity of a nation is determined not only by its history but also by its will for the future. In this sense, President Volodimir Zelensky seems to have represented the will of his citizenry, having applied for Ukraine’s accession to the European Union last year.
For now, the world’s great powers talk about the delicate balance that maintains peace in what Carl Sagan called our little blue dot in the cosmos. ~
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