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Europe is insecure and wary in a polarised world

The good, the noted and even the currently disdained gathered last weekend for the Munich Security Conference (MSC), the world's most important annual conclave devoted to geopolitical security changes and challenges. An event that has taken on some of the hardest issues since it was founded in 1963, this year's session wondered and debated whether many leading countries are now suffering from 'Westlessness', a term the conference coined for the notion that Europe and Western countries are now uncertain of their values and strategic orientation in today's changing, often confusing world.
Among those in attendance were French President Emmanuel Macron, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau , US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, Speaker of the US House of Representatives  Nancy Pelosi, Nato Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Mirroring the rising role of Asia, the conference also included the foreign ministers of China and India along with other countries with crucial current issues on the world stage such as Russia and Iran.
Germany's president grappled with the subject of so-called 'Westlessness' head-on as he called for Western powers to abandon the idea of 'Westernizing the world'. In a major foreign policy speech Frank-Walter Steinmeier said Western countries have overestimated themselves by expecting democratic ideals to flourish around the globe in a post-Cold War world.
"We, Germany, and we, the West, cannot shape the world in our own image. And so we must not overburden our foreign policy with the expectation that it will bring salvation," he said, adding that "morally guided positions" do not always help achieving foreign policy goals such as preventing wars and creating a more peaceful world.
"Europe, and Germany in particular, would do well to take a less missionary approach to the world," said Steinmeier, a prominent Social Democrat politician who served as foreign minister between 2005 and 2009, and between 2013 and 2016. 
"In Germany in particular we believed - supposedly with good reason - that the post-Cold War world revolved around a European sun, that the legacy of the European Enlightenment must necessarily be the focal point for all social development, and that some were just a bit late in getting there," said the German president. "But some of these assumptions have proven overly optimistic."
Not surprisingly France's Macron has a different view as leader of a country among the most sure its values should be the global norm. During an hour-long Q&A session hosted by MSC Chairman Wolfgang Ischinger, Macron said he was "convinced that we need a much stronger Europe".
Distancing France from another country always keen to impose its values - the US - the French leader called for a Mediterranean, not a transatlantic, policy in foreign affairs and global values.
"We need some freedom of action in Europe," he told MSC delegates. "We need to develop our own strategy. We don't have the same geographic conditions (as the US), not the same ideas about social equilibrium, about social welfare. There are ideals we have to defend. Mediterranean policy: that is a European thing, not a trans-Atlantic thing, and the same goes for Russia - we need a European policy, not just a transatlantic policy."
Ian Bremmer, president of the advisory Eurasia Group, was skeptical about Macron's plans, agreeing there is a "Westlessness" afoot today. "The Americans don't know what they want to do in terms of global security," he told the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle. "The Europeans don't know what they're remotely capable of in replacing or supplementing any of that role. Macron is largely playing a domestic political game, but he doesn't have a line with the Germans on that."
"This is not the end of the West, but it's really much weaker and more divided than has been historically," Bremmer said. "The Russians and the Chinese aren't as strong, but they know what they're doing, right?"
Yet being unsure might just be a good thing. It was US certainty and hubris in the Cold War that played such a driving force in the tragedies of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia - captured brilliantly by Graham Greene in 'The Quiet American' - following France's equally chauvinistic and equally failed policies in the region.
And it seems the US was unable to learn the lesson. The ill-considered and arrogant invasion of Iraq is still having terrible consequences today.
So the representative of Germany, itself a nation once way too sure of itself, has come to believe that the West should be less self-assured.
"The job of a prudent foreign policy is and must be to prevent wars, defuse conflicts and lessen suffering through courage and drive, "said Steinmeier. "Its task is also to seek normative understanding to safeguard our key life resources - but without expecting to be able to ensure complete global harmony."
"The second virtue we Germans should rediscover is curiosity. We must once again rediscover a far greater interest in what drives our partners, our competitors, our opponents, in the roots of their ambition, and in the reasons for their fears."
Now instead of a lecture, that sounds like what happens in a true dialogue.
- Jon Van Housen and Mariella Radaelli are editors at www.luminosityitalia.com news agency in Milan, Italy