‘We're not going to bend our knee’: How aid leaders reacted to VP at MSC

Global development leaders began to formulate a fightback immediately after the “nuclear bomb” of U.S. Vice President JD Vance’s explosive speech to the Munich Security Conference — which called time on U.S.-led international cooperation, a key insider says. The event was rocked by Vance ignoring Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine and other world crises to instead denounce European democracies for allegedly stifling free speech and religious freedom while siding with far-right and neo-fascist parties. Speaking at a Devex Pro event, Michael Werz, the MSC’s senior adviser for North America and multilateral affairs, offered an insight into the stunned backstage reaction in Munich to what he argued will be remembered as a moment when “history has been written.” “There was a lot of stubbornness, a lot of attitude of ‘We’re not going to bend our knee,’ we are not going to duck this,” Werz said, referring to conversations he overheard and discussions in development, climate, and international finance meetings that followed Friday’s speech. The consensus was that “at least we know where we stand, and we have to look for new alliances, coalitions of the willing,” the adviser explained, potential partners to “stabilize the global system,” perhaps key countries such as South Africa, Brazil, and India. “These conversations … they were not well formulated and well established because it was all too fresh. But, to a certain degree, you could see the contours of what will be future conversations in the development and international finance arena — which I found one of the more promising and one of the few optimistic outlooks of this Munich Security Conference,” Werz said. Werz likened Vance’s attack on the Western alliance to a “nuclear bomb” going off in the hall, revealing one European figure put it like this: “So the Americans tried to denazify the Europeans after ‘45, and now they're trying to renazify the Europeans?” During his conversation with Devex President and Editor-in-Chief Raj Kumar, Werz also: • Said some “hard national security and military people” still reject the growing consensus that successful development is key to achieving security — “they say we don't want to have a conversation with tree huggers and do-gooders” — but argued those people are now “a minority.” • Cautioned against attempting to boost support for development with the argument “maybe the migrants stay in Central America or Africa, and you don't have to worry about the border,” saying: “The framing is important, especially for the development arena.” • Argued it is possible to win support for causes such as gender equality on “economic” grounds, using the example of food security, which “will be provided by smallholder farmers, and the majority of those are women.” • Called for parts of rising military budgets to be rebadged as “unified security budgets” — to allow some of those resources to be spent on long-term “development planning,” as a recognized aspect of national security. • Warned much of the “institutional fabric” vital to development work will be lost soon, if the USAID funding freeze continues — and it might prove impossible to rebuild. “We will reach a point of no return relatively quickly,” Werz said. Werz explained the MSC “started as a military-to-military conversation” in 1963 — “usually elderly white men smoking cigarettes in back chambers” — but now increasingly embraces “nontraditional threat scenarios” including climate security, food security, development finance, and artificial intelligence.