From Wehrkunde to the World Stage: The Munich Security Conference at 62

This week, roughly 450 senior decision-makers, heads of state, and defense officials will converge on Munich's Hotel Bayerischer Hof for the 62nd Munich Security Conference. Nearly 50 heads of state have confirmed attendance. The agenda spans European defense, the future of the transatlantic relationship, regional conflicts, and the security implications of emerging technology. But the conference arriving on February 13 carries six decades of institutional weight that shapes how seriously its proceedings are taken.

Understanding where it came from is useful context for understanding what it has become.

It started with a man who once tried to kill Hitler.

The MSC began as a small, private gathering organized by Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzin, a man whose biography alone explains a good deal about why the conference exists. As a 22-year-old German Army lieutenant, von Kleist participated in the July 20, 1944 plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler. He survived arrest and detention in a concentration camp. After the war, he became a publisher in Munich and, in 1952, founded the Gesellschaft für Wehrkunde, an association devoted to defense affairs that eventually grew to over 4,000 members across 120 chapters.

By the early 1960s, with the Berlin crises and Cuban Missile Crisis exposing how little structured dialogue existed between Western allies outside official government channels, von Kleist saw an opening. On November 30, 1963, the first "Internationale Wehrkundebegegnung" convened in Munich.

The guest list was small, a few dozen people, but it included Henry Kissinger and Helmut Schmidt, who would later serve as West German Chancellor. The format was intentionally intimate: political leaders, senior officials, military officers, and academics discussing NATO security issues in a setting designed to be candid rather than ceremonial. Von Kleist personally selected all participants and set the topics.

For 25 years, the conference talked about one thing: surviving the Cold War.

For the first two and a half decades, the conference focused almost entirely on Cold War dynamics, particularly the credibility of NATO's nuclear deterrent, transatlantic burden-sharing, and the conventional force balance with the Warsaw Pact. It's easy to forget how narrow the original scope was. "Wehrkunde," as it was commonly known, was a transatlantic meeting by design, primarily German and American participants with representation from other NATO member states.

The discussions were technical, often centering on nuclear strategy and alliance cohesion. Von Kleist had identified what he called a "lack of experts on nuclear matters" among German legislators, and part of his motivation was closing that knowledge deficit within the political class itself. In practice, the conference served as an informal nerve center where Western policymakers could pressure-test ideas before they became official positions.

When the Wall fell, the conference had to decide whether to stay Western or go global.

When the Cold War ended, the conference faced a question that many Cold War institutions struggled with: what now?

Von Kleist and his successor, Horst Teltschik (who took over the chairmanship in 1998), made a deliberate decision to expand. Beginning in 1999, under Teltschik's leadership, the conference opened its doors to political, military, and business leaders from Central and Eastern Europe, Russia, China, India, Japan, and South Korea. The logic was straightforward. If the security challenges were no longer confined to the NATO-Warsaw Pact axis, the forum discussing them couldn't be either.

Consider the scale of that shift. A conference that had spent 35 years as a tightly curated Western dialogue was, within a few years, hosting Russian foreign ministers alongside American secretaries of state. By the mid-2000s, the participant list had grown from a few dozen to several hundred, with representation from over 70 countries.

Under new leadership, a weekend conference became a year-round institution.

Ambassador Wolfgang Ischinger assumed the chairmanship in 2008 and held it until 2022, overseeing a period of significant institutional growth. The conference expanded from a single annual event to a year-round operation with regional "Munich Leaders Meetings" in capitals from Washington to Beijing to New Delhi.

In 2018, the MSC Foundation was established with contributions from the German federal and Bavarian state governments, the Robert Bosch Foundation, and corporate donors. Funding grew from less than €1 million of public support in 2008 to approximately €10 million, mostly corporate, by 2022.

Ambassador Christoph Heusgen, previously Angela Merkel's foreign and security policy adviser and Germany's UN ambassador, took over as chairman in early 2022. Ischinger now serves as President of the Foundation Council.

Some of its most important moments were never on the agenda.

Some of the conference's most consequential moments have arrived not through planned sessions but through geopolitical timing. In February 2007, Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered what became known as his "Munich speech," sharply criticizing the post-Cold War unipolar order. In hindsight, the speech marked an inflection point in Russia-West relations that many attendees did not fully appreciate at the time.

Then there was February 2022. Vice President Kamala Harris warned of severe sanctions should Russia attack Ukraine. Five days after that conference ended, Russia launched its full-scale invasion. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy had addressed the MSC urging Western nations to abandon appeasement, in what proved to be one of the more prescient speeches in the conference's history.

The MSC has been cancelled only three times in its existence: in 1965 during a scheduling transition, in 1991 due to the First Gulf War, and in 1997 when von Kleist retired. The COVID-19 pandemic forced a virtual format in 2021 but did not result in cancellation.

At 62, the conference matters precisely because nothing is settled.

What makes the MSC distinct from other international forums, in practical terms, is its combination of informality and seniority. The conference produces no formal agreements, resolutions, or communiqués. Participants attend in part because of that. The Bayerischer Hof's corridors, side rooms, and restaurant spaces host hundreds of bilateral meetings and off-the-record conversations that often matter more than the panel sessions themselves.

This year's program includes approximately 200 official side events organized by partner institutions worldwide. The MSC Innovation Night, now in its ninth edition, will focus on "Strategic Algorithms: Winning the AI Arms Race," with the Boston Consulting Group launching its fifth Defense Innovation Report. POLITICO returns as the conference's media partner, expanding its presence with interviews, roundtables, and fireside chats.

The 62nd conference arrives at what organizers have called "a fundamental inflection point," with longstanding alliances under strain, escalating regional conflicts, and mounting questions about the durability of the rules-based international order. Whether you follow defense policy daily or observe it from adjacent sectors, the conversations happening in Munich this week will shape how governments, defense establishments, and their industrial partners allocate attention and resources for the year ahead. That alone makes it worth paying attention to.