JD Vance’s speech on Friday, European defense spending and reaction to Donald Trump’s call with Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
It’s been an eventful few days at the Munich Security Conference.
CGTN’s Natalie Carney reports.
#Munich #Europe
It’s been an eventful few days at the Munich Security Conference.
CGTN’s Natalie Carney reports.
#Munich #Europe
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NewsTranscript
00:00It really has been. The 61st Munich Security Conference really did highlight a lot of very critical issues in the global security atmosphere, you could say.
00:12Starting off with the speech from the Vice President of the U.S., J.D. Vance, in which he criticized European democracy,
00:20saying that Europeans were not allowing the voice of the right into conversations, whereby there was a lot of rebuttal from different European leaders, particularly here in Germany.
00:33Then we also had calls from EU nations to commit more to defense spending.
00:37Now this is an issue that's been going on for a few years at the MSC, after Trump threatened to withdraw in his last term, withdraw his country from NATO,
00:46if European countries didn't abide by the 2% of GDP mandate on defense spending for NATO.
00:54And of course the urgency of EU nations to come up with a concrete peace plan for Ukraine.
01:00I think that was one of the most critical issues discussed this weekend here in Munich.
01:06EU has been spending a lot of money, they've been sending arms, they've been supporting Ukraine in that way,
01:11but they have yet to come forward with a concrete plan of how to bring about peace in Ukraine.
01:16Trump and Putin, meanwhile, the President of Russia, had a phone conversation in which they started to discuss the peace process.
01:24So the EU is now concerned that they will be left out of those negotiations.
01:29While there's no Russian delegation here in Munich, they were again not invited to the talks this weekend.
01:36We did hear from the Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov, who took to Russian state TV over the weekend,
01:42to discuss the call between US President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin,
01:49and emphasized that it was a significant shift towards resolving issues through dialogue.
01:54We will now talk about peace, not war.
01:57So it looks like there's some progression in that direction.
02:00But again, Europe wants and needs to be on that table of discussions.
02:05So thus the conversation that's going to take place this upcoming week in Paris.
02:10But I think the exclamation mark of the whole summit was really said by the conference chairman in his closing remarks,
02:17Christoph Heusgen, when he said, we have to fear that our common value base is not that common anymore.
02:24This is the last conference for Mr. Heusgen.
02:27Next year, the conference will be chaired by the former NATO Secretary General, Jens Stoltenberg.