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.
