Munich’s new world order message to South Africa

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.

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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.

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