Despite the US vice-president reaffirming a commitment to collective defence, the mood in Munich was mostly one of frostiness and consternation

Europe’s leaders gathered in apprehensive mood in Munich on Saturday for their first chance to weigh up the new US leadership’s approach to collective defence in the face of what many perceive as a growing Russian threat.

The signs have been mixed, and confusing, since Donald Trump won election last November. He initially signalled warmth towards Vladimir Putin and some scorn towards Nato. More recently he has appeared to backtrack on both fronts.

The US vice-president Mike Pence, making his first visit to Europe since taking office, failed to quell those anxieties in a speech on Saturdayat the Munich security conference.

Instead, he left some of his European allies confused and alarmed, angry at being chastised for failing to pull their weight in the defence alliance, and concerned that too little attention is being paid to the future of the European Union.

The audience, made up of national leaders, defence and foreign ministers and other senior government figures, who would normally, out of politeness, offer up a warm welcome for a senior US politician, greeted some of his comments with sparse applause.

Pence, reiterating that the US remained committed to Nato, attempted to soothe concerns that Trump might deal directly with Putin, bypassing western Europe. The audience welcomed his promise that Russia will be held “accountable” for its actions in Ukraine, although he didn’t spell out how.

But he lost them when he went further than US defence secretary James Mattis at Nato headquarters last week in rebuking Nato members such as Germany, France and Italy for failing to pay a fair share of its financial burden.

Echoing Trump’s threat last year that he would not necessarily be bound by Nato’s article five, which commits every member to come to the aid of any that comes under attack, Pence reiterated the president’s warning that military help might depend on how much a country under attack had contributed to Nato.

Pence reminded the audience in Munich that Nato had two core principles; one was article five but the other, usually forgotten, was article three, dealing with shared financial burden. “We vowed in that treaty to contribute our fair share to our common defence,” Pence said. “The promise to share the burden of our defence has gone unfulfilled for too many for too long and it erodes the very foundation of our alliance. When even one ally fails to do their part, it undermines all of our ability to come to each other’s aid.”

Speaking after Pence, Germany’s foreign minister, Sigmar Gabriel, made it clear, as did German chancellor Angela Merkel earlier, that the country did not intend to be bullied by the Trump administration into increasing defence spending. “I don’t know where Germany can find billions of euros to boost defence spending if politicians also want to lower taxes,” Gabriel said.

The French foreign minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, tweeted to express disappointment that Pence’s speech contained “not a word on the European Union”. Trump has welcomed Brexit and seems hostile towards multilateral organisations such as the EU.

Ayrault, as well as Merkel, hailed multilateralism as more necessary than ever at a time of increasing crises, not least the rise of nationalism. In comments that seemed to be targeted at Trump’s “America First” policy, the French foreign minister, said: “In these difficult conditions, many are attempting to look inward, but this isolationism makes us more vulnerable. We need the opposite.”

Pence’s mission to Munich – he was accompanied by Mattis and US homeland security secretary John Kelly – served only to confirm a widening gulf between the US and core European countries, the UK excepted, and left allies as uncertain as before about Trump’s commitment to Nato.

Nicholas Burns, former under-secretary of state in the Bush administration and a former US ambassador to Nato, tweeted: “Despite VP Pence’s statement, the big question at Munich security conference: Does Pres Trump truly support Nato and the European Union?”

The Munich conference has been running for more than 50 years, founded by a senior German officer, Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist-Schmenzin, famous for his part in the 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler. He proposed bringing together leaders from around the world as a way to help prevent another world war.

The conference has grown into one of the biggest international forums outside the United Nations. It is an informal and pleasingly chaotic affair, with lots of chat in crammed meeting rooms and bars in the Bayerischer Hof hotel, a place of faded grandeur – chandeliers, tapestries, marble floors and busts of Bavarian notables from previous centuries – but with the advantage of being in Munich’s city centre.

Among the estimated 500 attending are 15 government leaders, 16 heads of state, 47 foreign ministers, 30 defence ministers, 59 representatives from international organisations including the secretary-generals of the UN and Nato, and philanthropists and celebrities including Bill Gates and Bono. As important as speeches in the conference hall are the many bilateral meetings – a Syrian peace agreement, even if it proved illusory, was reached here between the US and Russia last year.

US senator John McCain, chairman of the Senate armed services committee, war hero and former Republican presidential candidate, delivered a blistering attack on Trump on Friday. “What would Von Kleist’s generation say if they saw our world today? I fear that much about it would be all-too-familiar to them, and they would be alarmed by it,” McCain said.

He expressed concern about an unwillingness to “separate lies from truth”, the disarray in the Trump administration and a shift away from universal values “toward old ties of blood, and race, and sectarianism”.

Taking part in a panel discussion on the issue “Can the west survive?”, he said: “In recent years, this question would invite accusations of hyperbole and alarmism. Not this year. If ever there was a time to treat this question with deadly seriousness, it is now.”

McCain is not given to hyperbole. Nor is Wolfgang Ischinger, 70-year-old former German ambassador to the UK and US and now chair of the Munich conference, who said that Europe had entered an era of “maximum uncertainty”, a period more volatile than any time since the end of the second world war.

Europe already has a host of issues stacking up. It has failed to deal with the Russian involvement in Ukraine that led to the Crimea annexation in 2014, other than to support the imposition of sanctions that so far have proved ineffective in ending the violence. Europe and the US sat on the sidelines of the Syrian conflict, again outmanoeuvred by Russian intervention.

There are fears in Europe too of Russian intervention through cyber-attacks or the spread of fake news in upcoming elections in the Netherlands, France and Germany, though the Russian foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, speaking in Munich, rejected US intelligence claims that Moscow had interfered in the US presidential election. “I would like to say: ‘Give us some facts’,” he said.

Problems on Nato’s eastern and southern flanks, even if more serious than at any time since the second world war, are not new. What is new is that for the first time Europe cannot look with certainty towards the US for help.

And there is the other threat from the west, closer to home, the potential for Brexit to be the catalyst for the break-up of the EU.

The British tend to be more sanguine about Trump than their French and German counterparts. Foreign secretary Boris Johnson, also at Munich and on the same panel as McCain, was dismissive of apocalyptic warnings about the future of Nato and the west. He said there was nothing new in such predictions, recalling that Oswald Spengler’s seminal work The Decline of the West had been written in 1918.

The British defence secretary, Michael Fallon, speaking on a panel of defence ministers on Friday, said that the problem Europe should be worried about is not Trump but Putin. “It’s Putin, not Trump, who’s deploying those missiles. It’s Putin, not Trump, who’s interfering in foreign democracies,” Fallon said.

But security, in particular Nato and Russia, is viewed differently in Germany and France and elsewhere in Europe than it is among British Conservatives.

With Pence having failed to satisfy all those unanswered questions, Europeans might have to wait until May when Trump is scheduled to make his first trip to Europe as president to attend the annual Nato summit, being held this year in Brussels.

TRANSATLANTIC FLASHPOINTS

Russia

Russia is scheduled in September to hold its biggest military exercise along its western border for 20 years, citing provocation from Nato expansion. Tensions with the west have risen since Russia annexed Crimea in 2014 and it is accused of continuing violations against Ukraine. Trump, in the interests of rapprochement with Vladimir Putin, could abandon US sanctions.

Baltic states

With large ethnic Russian populations in the Baltic states, Putin could test Nato through hybrid warfare: a mixture of cyber-attacks, propaganda and deniable interventions. A decade ago, Estonia, amid a dispute with Russia, received a taste of such cyber-attacks, which hit its parliament, government departments, banks and other key infrastructure.

Brexit



March sees the 60th anniversary of the Treaty of Rome that led to the creation of the European Union. The same month the EU faces its biggest challenge when the UK triggers article 50. The fear among the remaining 27 members is that this will encourage others to leave too, with Donald Trump, who applauded Brexit, cheering on the sidelines. Against this turbulent background and the rise in populism, elections are coming up in the Netherlands, France and Germany, and concern that Russia might interfere, as it is alleged to have done in the US.