Hello and welcome to another episode of Realpolitik.

I am your host, Viras Modad.

As has become customary, this is a live episode, so please drop your comments or questions

in the chat or on the comments page on the website and I will do my best to address them. Today we're going to be talking about the Munich Security Conference, which took place

over most of last week, with really the final days being Friday and Saturday, or Thursday,

Friday and Saturday, where the big hitters, the country leaders, secretary Rubio, etc. came and spoke.

Now, first, I want to tell you what is the Munich Security Conference and why is it important?

The way that the global calendar works is that first you have Davos, sometime usually in January, where the corporations meet with the governments,

and it's really corporate focus for the most part. And they go around and they discuss their

priorities and what they expect and what they want and things of that nature. And then afterwards,

the governments themselves, particularly at the

defense and security level, ship off to Munich and have their own big conference that kind of sets

the global security agenda. And this is an old event. It's been happening for 60 years, but it's really been gaining

prominence as the government's version of Davos, where they set out, as I said, their security

priorities. And now you have participation of the Chinese and of the Indians and of a bunch of other

countries. And it gives you a great deal of insights

into the nature of foreign relations. If you will remember from previous episodes, we discussed

how in 2007 at the Munich Security Conference, Russian President Vladimir Putin pretty much set

out his opposition to further NATO expansion

and warned that there were going to be consequences. And then the result of that was the 2008

invasion of a big part of Georgia, which sort of ended the possibility of Georgia joining NATO

and pretty much put a halt on further NATO expansion.

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