[IMPORTANT: Make this 4 times longer with much more detail]
Situation Report A weekly digest of national security, defense, and cybersecurity news from Foreign Policy reporter John Haltiwanger. Delivered Thursday. Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and to receive email correspondence from us. You may opt out at any time. Enter your email Sign Up ✓ Signed Up Munich Braces for Team Trump The U.S. president isn’t attending the Munich Security Conference himself, but he’s poised to dominate the conversation nonetheless. By John Haltiwanger , a reporter at Foreign Policy , and Rishi Iyengar , a reporter at Foreign Policy . J.D. Vance and Usha Vance stand at the top of steps at the door of an airplane, both waving toward the camera. J.D. wears a black suit and red tie, and Usha wears a dark gray peacoat. Theit two sons wear matching coats and descend the steps in front of them. U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife, Usha Vance, wave upon landing at Munich International Airport on Feb. 13. Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images My FP: Follow topics and authors to get straight to what you like. Exclusively for FP subscribers. Subscribe Now | Log In Foreign & Public Diplomacy NATO United States Europe Rishi Iyengar John Haltiwanger February 13, 2025, 3:33 PM Comment icon View Comments ( 1 ) Welcome back to Foreign Policy ’s Situation Report and hello from Munich, where your co-author Rishi landed today having mercifully escaped a Washington, D.C., snowstorm. Rishi and FP’s Keith Johnson will be on the ground at the Munich Security Conference in the city’s Bayerischer Hof Hotel through the rest of this week, so reach out if there’s anything you’d like to share or think they should know about. You can email them directly at rishi.iyengar@foreignpolicy.com and keith.johnson@foreignpolicy.com . Welcome back to Foreign Policy ’s Situation Report and hello from Munich, where your co-author Rishi landed today having mercifully escaped a Washington, D.C., snowstorm. Rishi and FP’s Keith Johnson will be on the ground at the Munich Security Conference in the city’s Bayerischer Hof Hotel through the rest of this week, so reach out if there’s anything you’d like to share or think they should know about. You can email them directly at rishi.iyengar@foreignpolicy.com and keith.johnson@foreignpolicy.com . Trending Articles The Dangers of Presidential Impoundment Nixon tried what Trump is planning—and it caused a constitutional crisis. Powered By Advertisement The Dangers of Presidential Impoundment X And look out for special editions of SitRep tomorrow and Saturday, with insider scoops from MSC. Know a friend or colleague who would be interested in receiving that? Tell them to sign up here . Alright, here’s what’s on tap for the day: U.S. President Donald Trump is set to dominate the conversation in Munich , the shaky cease-fire in Gaza holds, and U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance takes a stand on AI in France . Munich Braces for Team Trump The possible second Trump term that Europe was anxiously anticipating at last year’s gathering of the Munich Security Conference is now firmly underway, and the hundreds of high-profile attendees descending on the German city today are bracing for what the new administration has in store for Ukraine, Europe, and NATO this time around. Already, ahead of the conference, Trump’s recently confirmed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has put the continent’s dozens of U.S. allies on notice. Speaking at NATO headquarters in Brussels on Wednesday during a Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting , Hegseth said Ukrainian membership in the alliance—a key goal of Kyiv’s—is not a “realistic” outcome of a negotiated end to the war. Also “unrealistic” in his book: returning Ukraine’s territory to its pre-2014 borders, before Russia seized the Crimean Peninsula. Hegseth pushed Europe to take on more of the burden for ensuring Ukraine’s (and the continent’s) defense, echoing Trump’s push for European NATO allies to increase their defense spending target from 2 percent to 5 percent of their gross domestic products. He also stressed that any security guarantees to Ukraine as part of a potential deal to end the war should be backed by “European and non-European troops,” which would be “part of a non-NATO mission” and added that “there will not be U.S. troops deployed to Ukraine.” However, during a Thursday press conference in Brussels, Hegseth appeared to walk back his comments from the previous day, saying that “everything is on the table” when it comes to negotiating an end to the war. Responding to criticism that he had ceded leverage over Putin in making such definitive statements about Ukraine’s future, Hegseth said, “I’m not going to stand at this podium and declare what President Trump will do or won’t do, what will be in or what will be out, what concessions will be made or what concessions are not made.” The SecDef’s statements will no doubt linger over the Munich Security Conference, where he will join Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President J.D. Vance—along with several lawmakers—as part of a U.S. delegation to the gathering. Vance, a longtime skeptic of Ukraine funding who attended last year’s MSC as a U.S. senator, is expected to meet with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on Friday. Yet Hegseth’s Wednesday comments, while a marked departure from the U.S. position on supporting Ukraine under former President Joe Biden, are less controversial today than they once might have been. “Europe needs to do more, it’s obvious,” Jan Lipavsky, the foreign minister of the Czech Republic, told a small group of reporters in Washington last week. “Europe needs to get tougher; Europe needs to get serious. There’s a long way to go,” Lipavsky added. “Maybe with the new U.S. administration there will be new incentives, which will move us in that direction.” The road to 5 percent. Trump’s 5 percent defense spending target will be a stretch for most of NATO’s 32 member countries. Poland tops the alliance with a little more than 4 percent of its GDP dedicated to defense, according to the most recent estimates , and there are eight countries in the group that haven’t even hit 2 percent yet. Sign up for Editors’ Picks A curated selection of FP’s must-read stories. Sign Up By submitting your email, you agree to the Privacy Policy and Terms of Use and to receive email correspondence from us. You may opt out at any time. Enter your email Sign Up ✓ Signed Up You’re on the list! More ways to stay updated on global news: FP Live Enter your email Sign Up ✓ Signed Up World Brief Enter your email Sign Up ✓ Signed Up China Brief Enter your email Sign Up ✓ Signed Up South Asia Brief Enter your email Sign Up ✓ Signed Up Situation Report Enter your email Sign Up ✓ Signed Up View All Newsletters A report published this week by a task force of 14 former U.S. and European officials argues that a new baseline is needed. The report, published Wednesday by Harvard University’s Belfer Center, calls on most European countries to raise their spending to at least 3 percent of GDP “at least for the next three to five years,” while also supplying between 70 and 80 percent of NATO’s armed forces and replacing the 20,000 U.S. troops that were deployed to Europe at the start of the Ukraine conflict. But the imperative goes beyond the numbers and even beyond the outcome of the Ukraine conflict, according to Ivo Daalder, the former U.S. ambassador to NATO who co-chaired the task force. “There’s a realization that even if the war were to end in the sense that the fighting stops, the conflict will remain, and importantly that Russia is committed now because it has transformed its economy into a war economy,” Daalder told Foreign Policy . “It’s increasingly clear that Europe can no longer outsource its security to other actors and particularly to the United States—one, because the time has come for Europe to stand on its own two feet, and two, because the United States is becoming a less and less reliable partner.” Munich multipolarity. That reliability (or lack thereof) will be top of mind at Munich. “Donald Trump’s presidential victory has buried the US post-Cold War foreign policy consensus that a grand strategy of liberal internationalism would best serve US interests,” read the annual Munich Security Report released ahead of the conference. The Trump-inspired U.S. retreat, not only from Europe but also from much of the international order that it helped build, will accelerate what the report terms “multipolarization”—a more diffuse and divided world. Many argue that that multipolar world is already here, including Rubio. The new U.S. secretary of state, in an interview with former Fox News host Megyn Kelly just days after taking office in January, poured cold water on the idea of Washington being everything, everywhere, all at once. “It’s not normal for the world to simply have a unipolar power … that was an anomaly,” he said. “It was a product of the end of the Cold War, but eventually you were going to reach back to a point where you had a multipolar world, multi-great powers in different parts of the planet.” Deal or no deal? The most pressing matter remains a potential agreement to end the war in Ukraine, including whether Trump can bring Russian President Vladimir Putin and his Ukrainian counterpart, Zelensky, to the negotiating table and what such an agreement might look like. Trump, who will remain in Washington to host Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi this week, nonetheless set the Munich agenda by speaking with Putin and Zelensky over the phone on Wednesday—and posting about it online. “I just had a lengthy and highly productive phone call with President Vladimir Putin of Russia,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “As we both agreed, we want to stop the millions of deaths taking place in the War with Russia/Ukraine,” he added. “We have also agreed to have our respective teams start negotiations immediately. Trump wrote in a subsequent post that he had spoken to Zelensky, who, “like President Putin, wants to make PEACE.” Zelensky echoed that sentiment in his own post on X, writing, “We believe that America’s strength, together with Ukraine and all our partners, is enough to push Russia to peace.” Kyiv appears prepared to sweeten the pot for Trump, offering access to Ukraine’s critical minerals as part of a broader deal for continued U.S. support that Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent flew to Kyiv this week to negotiate. When it comes to negotiating with Putin, what matters is how much leverage Trump and the West have. “Putin is sitting on piles of cash he can’t convert. He’s spending almost 50 percent of his GDP equivalent on defense, which is unsustainable,” said H.R. McMaster, who served as national security advisor during Trump’s first term, in comments to reporters at a recent Center for European Policy Analysis briefing. “What President Trump is probably hearing is: ‘You have an opportunity to win here,’ and part of that being to get toward a path to peace in Ukraine.” Whether it’s a Ukraine peace deal, broader questions about the trans-Atlantic relationship, or his deal to “take over” Gaza, Trump has ensured that he will dominate the conversation in Munich even from afar. “I think Trump has a desire to suck the air out of every room,” said Daalder, “and he’s going to suck the air out of the Bayerischer Hof.” Let’s Get Personnel The latest Trump appointees confirmed by the Senate: Russell Vought as director of the Office of Management and Budget Tulsi Gabbard as director of national intelligence Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health and human services secretary Brooke Rollins as agriculture secretary On the Button What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already. The Gaza cease-fire holds—for now. There have been rising concerns this week that the fragile Gaza cease-fire is on the verge of collapsing. But Hamas on Thursday said it remained committed to the truce with Israel and will “continue its position of implementing the agreement according to what was signed, including the exchange of prisoners according to the specified schedule.” This came just days after the Palestinian militant group announced an indefinite postponement on the release of hostages, accusing Israel of violating the terms of the cease-fire. Trump threatened that “all hell” would break out if hostages weren’t released by Saturday. Similarly, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said that the cease-fire would be “terminated” if Hamas delayed releasing hostages. Trump’s proposal for the U.S. to “take over” and rebuild Gaza, which would see the enclave’s entire population displaced, has also contributed to the uncertainty surrounding the tenuous cease-fire. “Trump has taken a hugely naive and undignified approach to the discussion around Palestine, and this has done nothing but destabilize a very fragile cease-fire process,” a U.N. official told SitRep, speaking on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the matter. Palestinians have a “right to self-determination,” and “forcible transfer” from “occupied territory” is prohibited under international law, the official added. M(AI)GA. Munich wasn’t Vance’s first port of call on this Euro-trip. The vice president first touched down in Paris earlier this week, where he attended France’s Artificial Intelligence Action Summit and gave a speech making clear that Washington’s shackles on AI are off. “We believe that excessive regulation of the AI sector could kill a transformative industry just as it’s taking off, and we’ll make every effort to encourage pro-growth AI policies,” Vance said. “The AI future is not going to be won by hand-wringing about safety.” The contrast with his predecessor Kamala Harris—whose speech at the United Kingdom’s AI Safety Summit two years earlier focused primarily on the guardrails needed around the technology—could not have been starker. “Americas First.” Latin America is poised to be a top priority for Trump and Rubio, who recently said the administration will pursue an “Americas First” foreign policy. Former U.S. Southcom Commander Gen. Laura Richardson told Foreign Policy that she’s “hopeful” about the Trump administration’s approach to the region while warning against a “blanket stop” on aid following a recent freeze on foreign assistance and a move to dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development. Read the full interview here . Snapshot Elon Musk, joined by his son X, delivers remarks alongside U.S. President Donald Trump during an executive order signing in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 11. Elon Musk, joined by his son X, delivers remarks alongside U.S. President Donald Trump during an executive order signing in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 11. Andrew Harnik/Getty Images Put On Your Radar Friday, Feb. 14: The Munich Security Conference begins. Saturday, Feb. 15: The African Union summit begins in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. An early presidential election is set to occur in Abkhazia, a Moscow-backed breakaway region of Georgia occupied by Russian forces. Tuesday, Feb. 18: An extended deadline for Israeli troops to leave southern Lebanon as part of a cease-fire deal expires. Quote of the Week “Some of the things that I say will be incorrect and should be corrected. Nobody’s going to bat a thousand.” —Elon Musk, speaking at the White House in response to a question from a reporter regarding false claims he made that the United States spent $50 million on condoms in Gaza. This Week’s Most Read What Trump’s Gaza Plan Means for the World by FP contributors Did Biden Get China Right? by Lili Pike The Chaos at USAID, Explained by John Haltiwanger and Christina Lu Whiskey Tango Foxtrot A dozen people were injured on Wednesday when a grenade was thrown into a crowded bar in Grenoble, France. It’s not clear what the motive for this extreme act of violence was, but investigators say it “may be linked to a settling of scores.” Prosecutor Francois Touret-de-Courcey told reporters that there’s nothing to indicate the incident was “linked to terrorism” and said investigators are looking into whether the attack was tied to drug trafficking. The suspect remains unidentified. John Haltiwanger is a reporter at Foreign Policy . X: @jchaltiwanger Rishi Iyengar is a reporter at Foreign Policy . X: @Iyengarish Read More On Alliances | Donald Trump | Europe | Foreign & Public Diplomacy | Germany | Munich Security Conference | NATO | United States | War Join the Conversation Commenting on this and other recent articles is just one benefit of a Foreign Policy subscription. Already a subscriber? Log In . Subscribe Subscribe View 1 Comments Join the Conversation Join the conversation on this and other recent Foreign Policy articles when you subscribe now. 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