“Davos with Guns”
MARCH 18, 2025
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A conversation with Caitlin L. Chandler, who wrote a dispatch from the Munich Security Conference for our Gospel issue.
When it was first created, in 1963, the Munich Security Conference brought together German military officials with their U.S. and NATO counterparts to discuss countering the USSR. Typically, a few dozen people attended. This year, some 450 CEOs, generals, and politicians participated in what is often called “Davos with guns.” Caitlin L. Chandler was among them, and wrote that although officials like U.S. Vice President J. D. Vance made the splashiest headlines, the most interesting discussions took place away from the main stage. “I wanted to understand how we could think about the future of the Geneva Conventions — the rules governing warfare — given the increased normalization of war crimes such as bombing hospitals and targeting civilians,” she wrote.
THE DIAL: United States Vice President J. D. Vance made headlines for a controversial speech where he criticized Europeans for restricting the free speech of far-right parties and being too lax with immigration. How was that speech received?
CAITLIN L. CHANDLER: It was a huge departure from previous American politician statements at the MSC. Usually, the United States would vow to continue the transatlantic alliance, as it's called, or pledge ongoing support for European security. Many people were expecting Vance to deviate from the norm, but they were not anticipating that it would be quite so radical. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier spoke just before Vance, as I wrote about in the piece, and had tried to convey that the relationship between the U.S. and Europe wouldn’t change, despite Trump. And then everything was flipped on its head after Vance spoke.
A lot of MSC participants were shocked. But if they had been paying attention to the statements and actions coming from the Trump administration ahead of the conference, they might actually have been able to anticipate that the U.S. would use the MSC for these kind of “shock and awe” tactics. (Shock and awe was the U.S. military strategy when it invaded Iraq in 2003 — to display immense force in order to overwhelm the population — and which writer Naomi Klein explores in her book The Shock Doctrine.)
THE DIAL: In the piece, you mention a number of examples of large companies abandoning pledges or governments failing to uphold international agreements. How do those actions contradict their public statements or values?
CC: There used to be at least a public-facing consensus among a lot of major American technology companies that their products were supposed to be contributing to democratic values. They developed policies against spreading misinformation on their platforms, hired ethicists and listened to employees, many of whom had called for technology companies not to use their products to cause harm, such as for warfare. Of course, some companies had been involved with U.S. Department of Defense research; not all companies had a perfect track record. But what was stunning to me was that in the months leading up to Munich and Trump’s inauguration, many companies that make products we use on a regular basis — like Google and Meta — fully reversed course. They dropped prior commitments around not using AI or products in warfare or large-scale surveillance. That opens the door for their products to be used for surveillance and war by authoritarian or democratic governments, making it even easier to implement repressive tactics.
THE DIAL: The conference is sometimes referred to as Davos with guns. What did you make of this focus on defense and military spending over other concerns, like humanitarian issues, and is this anxiety about how to ramp up defense spending legitimate in the current climate?
CC: Since the Geneva Conventions, a system of international laws has been used to govern warfare and protect civilians from the most brutal and cruel forms of human violence. For example, hospitals are never supposed to be military targets. The MSC had a few sessions on humanitarian issues on the conference agenda, and it may have been useful for the panelists that were invited to speak on those specific topics. But they were marginal to the overall agenda and felt tokenistic. It was as though MSC was checking a box, so that it could say these issues had been included.
The first decades of the MSC did not include non-Western countries and there has been an effort to include more people from other regions in the last few years. Some of the delegates from Africa, South America and Asian countries were quite critical of how European defense spending dominated main discussions instead of other threats, such as climate change.
THE DIAL: What surprised you most of the conference, and was there a conversation or panel that stuck with you in particular?
CC: I certainly didn't have high hopes that it was going to be a very meaningful place for discussion, but I was still taken aback by the circus-like aspects of it — including the media circus around it. There were hundreds of journalists at the conference, and many didn't have meaningful access to the event but had been encouraged to come by the MSC as if to create a press frenzy. Politicians like Vance knew that they could use the conference to kind of test out shocking statements or policy shifts.
There was this almost fever-like rush for European politicians to get on board with new defense spending policies and budgets, and there was no substantive discussion around other strategies or the risks involved.
On the eve of the conference, I read about a dinner that was organized with the executive director of the U.N. World Food Programme and Munich Security Conference staff. The menu was made up of “almost extinct” foods like Norwegian cod fillet. The disconnect between the reality that many people are currently experiencing hunger, in part because of climate change, and this fancy dinner was sickening. Could the head of a U.N. agency and MSC staff have pushed back and said, “No, let's just eat doner kebab and talk about how we can get more money to famine relief?” This disconnect is something that I wanted to highlight in the piece.
I also bumped into several American congressional representatives floating around Munich, including my own from Virginia. Many of them were repeating outdated rhetoric and didn’t seem to really grasp how the world was changing and how a different kind of leadership was needed to respond to those changes.
THE DIAL: What announcements or concrete changes might we expect to see in the coming weeks or months as a result of the conference?
CC: I don’t think the MSC is a place where decisions truly get made. I think the decisions are made before, but then they are presented, tested, piloted at Munich.
But the Trump administration reportedly first approached Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about the country’s rare earth minerals at the MSC. These rare earths have featured in the ceasefire negotiations that are now taking place. So I think we can expect to see a rare earth deal that's advantageous to the U.S. come out of that.
We’ve already seen a number of announcements from European leaders that they are trying to create a defense policy that doesn't rely on the U.S., and that they want to increase defense spending. Germany, for example, seems likely to spend 1 trillion euros in the coming decade on weapons and infrastructure.
THE DIAL: Reporting on the Munich Security Conference was not easy. You mentioned in this piece that security was very tight and journalists were closely monitored. How did you navigate around this and what kind of challenges did this create for your reporting?
CC: Yes, I was surprised to arrive at the Munich Security Conference and realize that most journalists couldn't access any parts of the conference. While it's understandable that security is tight for an event with diplomats and politicians, we had already passed a police background check and a review from MSC staff. It certainly seemed designed to keep out journalists who are interested in meaningfully covering the event.
So, I did the best I could. I went to side events. I tried to get into actual events. And the entire time I was meeting people on the sidelines. I met several other journalists who were forbidden from entering the main conference, and then we worked together to map out which events we could get into and we shared information. It was a bonding experience in that way — sometimes you learn more from being on the outside of power than on the inside.
CAITLIN L. CHANDLER is a writer and journalist based in Berlin. Her work has appeared in Harper's, The New York Review of Books, The Guardian, Guernica, The Washington Post, Africa is a Country and elsewhere. She teaches journalism at the Council on International Education Exchange.
DEVIN CALIBOSO is an aspiring Filipino-American writer. He grew up in Southern California, but is now an English-major undergraduate at UC Berkeley. Go Bears!