For decades, the Munich Security Conference has served as a platform to assess the state of health of the transatlantic alliance. Lately, however, it has become more of an emergency room to diagnose whether the patient’s heart is still beating. Those who considered last year’s tense meeting a low point in Europe-US relations have discovered it can slide even further.

Main take-aways:

GERMAN STEP-UP. Germany’s President Frank Walter Steinmeier accused Washington, Beijing and Moscow of jeopardising the international order by stoking global mistrust and insecurity with a “great powers competition”. The surprisingly assertive tone may mark a new page in German foreign policy that helps increase the European role in international security in view of the strained relationship with the US. Although Steinmeier and other German diplomats took a step many in Europe have been calling for in recent years, they were careful not to come too close to the French position of a Europe striving for complete strategic autonomy from Washington.

US SHOUT-OUT. A lot of verbal sparring was on display, but compared to last year’s outburst, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this time struck a more conciliatory tone, saying the West was alive and in good shape. US officials did not spare on warnings towards Europe, but this time it was not defence spending they were after, but China, China, China. The coordinated broadside against Huawei once again indicated that US-Europe relations in the future might largely depend on whether and how Europeans agree on Washington’s strategy toward Beijing.

“There’s no doubt that transatlantic cooperation has become more transactional as America has withdrawn from its role as a determined global leader,” former NATO Sec-Gen Anders Fogh Rasmussen told EURACTIV. According to him, the lack of strong cooperation between the world’s democracies “risks allowing China to set the terms of the next industrial revolution”.

“This would be a grave mistake and would cement the decline of the democratic West,” Rasmussen said, adding, however he took comfort in seeing the large bipartisan US delegation, which he called “a sign that all hope is certainly not lost”.

EU SPEAK-OUT. It seemed as if the ghost of French President Macron’s remarks, where he presented EU reform as antidote of the West’s decline, will hang over Brussels for quite a while, as the contrasts between the different visions of Europe became once again clear in Munich.

“We urgently need a Franco-German debate on how to make our common foreign policy more adapted to the challenges in our neighbourhood – and we need to put our money where our mouth is,” MEP Hannah Neumann (Greens) told EURACTIV. “This is also why the current position of Germany (and France) on the EU budget is unacceptable – a stronger EU needs a bigger budget,” she added.

Europe’s wish to have more global influence will require more “ability to act” on the bloc’s foreign policy decisions. Translation: We need to abolish unanimity in EU foreign policy-making. Over to you, Conference on the future of Europe.

CONFLICT BOG-DOWN. With more backroom diplomacy than ever, the conference could not bring any breakthrough in any of the unresolved conflicts, whether it was Libya, Ukraine, Nagorno-Karabakh or Serbia-Kosovo.

“It was telling and depressing that there were more mentions of Huawei than Idlib. The divisions in the West were on full display, and the absence of coherent Western leadership was striking,” David Miliband, International Rescue Committee, (IRC) told EURACTIV.

In case you missed the whole weekend discussions, here are the hot topics of Day #1, Day #2 and Day #3, and some articles you might want to follow up on: