Searching for a Common Vision

In Munich, the leaders of liberal democracies sought to push back against this revisionism, reaffirm their commitment to Ukraine, and discuss how to re-envision the international order to create wider ownership.

The MSC 2023 was the first under the chairmanship of Christoph Heusgen and marked the forceful return of post-pandemic diplomacy. The conference hosted a record number of bilateral and multilateral meetings and the largest US Congressional delegation ever. The greatest number of representatives from the “Global South”, gender parity on panels, and the
launch of a new Women Parliamentarians Program also made this year’s conference more diverse than its predecessors. Russian and Iranian officials were absent, however, as the MSC did not see any chance for a constructive dialogue with these regimes and instead invited prominent voices from Russian and Iranian civil society.

Following on from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s rousing speech, leaders from liberal democracies around the world including German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, French President Emmanuel Macron, and US Vice-President Kamala D. Harris expressed their unwavering commitment to support Ukraine for “as long as it takes” and to hold the
perpetrators of war crimes accountable. The conference program also featured the manifold other, and often inter-related, global and regional security challenges, including instability in the Indo-Pacific and the Sahel, climate and food crises, and the risks of nuclear proliferation.