Hello from Munich, where your Situation Report coauthors are just barely hanging on after an arduous journey plagued by flight cancellations due to the Lufthansa strike. We’ll be on the ground at the Bayerischer Hof Hotel for this year’s Munich Security Conference (say hello if you are, too, especially if you’re NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte) with special daily pop-up editions of SitRep through Sunday.
Alright, here’s what’s on tap for today. Europe plays defense as Washington waffles, a Munich check-in on the state of cyber, and some weird things happening in El Paso.
Trans-Atlantic Trepidation
Today’s SitRep lead author is trying not to read too much into the first advertisement he saw as he exited Munich Airport this morning championing “EUROPEAN DEFENSE” in all caps and promoting a new autonomous drone partnership between German defense tech firms Helsing and Hensoldt. The companies’ joint announcement is even more on the nose, touting “sovereign German and European technology architecture” that will “sustainably strengthen the defense capabilities and technological leadership of a democratic Europe through purely national technology and supply chains.”
Self-reliance is clearly on European minds heading into this week’s conference—exactly one year after U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance shocked conference attendees in Munich with a lecture on sovereignty and defense burdens, and weeks after U.S. President Donald Trump shocked many of those same attendees in Davos, Switzerland, with a speech calling for the U.S. takeover of Greenland (before NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte engineered a détente).
Trump’s threat to the territorial integrity of a NATO ally (Denmark, which controls Greenland) is the “final nail in the coffin” for the alliance, said retired Gen. Richard Shirreff, who served as NATO’s deputy supreme allied commander Europe from 2011 to 2014. “By doing that, Trump has blown a hole through the concept of collective defense,” Shirreff said, “and in doing so it forces Canada and Europe to effectively say to America: ‘We want to maintain links with you, but we have to Europeanize and Canadianize the NATO alliance.’” (Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney has made it clear that he shares at least a version of that sentiment.)
Officials in Munich on Thursday didn’t quite go that far, but self-sufficiency was the name of the game. “We must be united,” Andrius Kubilius, the European commissioner for defense and space, told the Munich Security Breakfast—a conference event that aims to connect European defense start-ups with investors. “We have continental scale, a European scale,” Kubilius added. “We need to learn how to use this scale for massive innovation in defense.”
“Primary responsibility.” The shift is also being spurred on actively by Washington, as evidenced by a speech by U.S. Undersecretary of Defense Elbridge Colby—standing in for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth—at a NATO defense ministers’ meeting in Brussels on Thursday. “Europe must assume primary responsibility for its own conventional defense,” Colby said, adding that the United States will “continue to press, respectfully but firmly and insistently, for a rebalancing of roles and burdens” within the alliance. (He did, however, make clear that the U.S. nuclear umbrella over Europe would remain intact.)
Some of that rebalancing is already happening, with NATO announcing earlier this week that the United Kingdom and Italy will take over the joint force commands in Norfolk, Virginia, and Naples, Italy, respectively, from the United States.
But it’s exceedingly clear that the trans-Atlantic relationship is in a state of flux, and the next three days in Munich are likely to produce a mix of lamenting what is lost and figuring out what comes next. The 2026 Munich Security Report—a customary precursor to the conference—leans heavily into that theme, writing that “the world has entered a period of wrecking-ball politics.”
“The most powerful of those who take the axe to existing rules and institutions is US President Donald Trump,” the report says, adding that in some cases such as heightened NATO defense spending targets, that upheaval has produced important results. “Yet, it is unclear whether destruction is really clearing the ground for policies that will increase the security, prosperity, and freedom of the people.”
Let’s Get Personnel
A U.S. federal court has sided with Sen. Mark Kelly in his fight against Hegseth, who had sought to demote Kelly from his rank as Navy captain and cut his retirement pay in retaliation for Kelly appearing in a video with several other lawmakers urging U.S. troops not to follow unlawful orders. Hegseth and the Pentagon “have trampled on Senator Kelly’s First Amendment freedoms and threatened the constitutional liberties of millions of military retirees,” the judge said in a Thursday ruling that temporarily blocked Hegseth from taking action against Kelly.
On the Button
What should be high on your radar, if it isn’t already.
El Paso fiasco. Something strange happened in the city of El Paso, Texas, this week—we’re just not exactly sure why.
Here’s what we do know: Late on Tuesday, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) suddenly announced El Paso’s airspace would be closed for 10 days. The highly unusual move raised alarm bells, and not just because of the implications for commercial and emergency air travel in the area. The FAA reportedly made this decision unilaterally, without warning other parts of the federal government or local government officials. On Wednesday morning, the pause was lifted at the urging of the White House.
But the explanations that have emerged since are all over the place, and don’t exactly paint a picture of a government that’s in sync.
The Trump administration announced that the temporary closure was due to a Mexican drug cartel drone incursion. “The threat has been neutralized, and there is no danger to commercial travel in the region,” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said in a post on X on Wednesday morning, adding that normal flights would resume. It’s not unusual for cartel drones to fly into U.S. airspace, but other accounts have undermined the Trump administration’s public claims about what occurred.
Some reports suggest that the airspace closure was a result of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials firing an anti-drone laser that was loaned by the Pentagon without giving the FAA a proper heads-up. What’s more, these reports say that CBP officials fired the laser at a party balloon they mistook for a drone. Throwing further doubt on the Trump administration’s official account, Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum at a press conference on Wednesday said her government had no information regarding drone activity at the border.
As things stand, it’s hard to know precisely what happened—and lawmakers in Washington are pushing for more answers. “The conflicting accounts coming from different parts of the federal government only deepen public concern and raise serious questions about coordination and decision-making,” Democratic Sen. Jack Reed, the ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement.
Snapshot
Ukrainian skeleton racer Vladyslav Heraskevych participates in men’s training heat 3 on day four of the 2026 Milano Cortina Winter Olympics in Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy, on Feb. 10. Heraskevych was disqualified over his plan to wear a helmet honoring Ukrainians killed in the country’s war with Russia, which the International Olympic Committee said would violate the Games’ rules against political speech.Al Bello / Getty Images
Cyber Concerns
Another MSC side event SitRep found itself at on Thursday was the Munich Cyber Security Conference (MCSC), which gathered cyber officials and executives from both sides of the Atlantic and beyond—including delegations from Kenya and Japan.
But all eyes remained on Washington, and the opening statements by U.S. National Cyber Director Sean Cairncross. As Rishi reported in FP’s latest print issue last month, allies around the world have been worried about U.S. engagement in collective cyberdefense, and the gaps it leaves for adversaries such as China and Russia to exploit.
Cairncross sought to provide some reassurance—sort of. “I should be clear that ‘America First’ is not America alone. We are looking for partnership, we value partnership,” he said. “But there are conversations that we need to have that address hard choices.”
Cairncross instead put the onus on U.S. allies. “We want that partnership and we want that to continue, but that’s not our choice,” he said. “America would do it alone, but that’s not the choice that we would make.”
One former U.S. cyber official did sound a note of warning about pulling back. “In the United States, two friendly nations to our north and south, two large oceans to our east and west do not protect us from the malware, the attacks, the domain of cyberspace today,” retired Gen. Paul Nakasone, the former head of the National Security Agency and the U.S. military’s Cyber Command, said on another panel later in the day. “So if our nations are going to decouple, we do so at our own risk. We are much better working together, and so the idea of decoupling technology, decoupling information sharing—for someone that had done this in the public sector—is something I’m very concerned about.”
Put on Your Radar
Sunday, Feb. 15: U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio departs the Munich Security Conference for a two-day trip to Slovakia and Hungary.
Tuesday, Feb. 17: French President Emmanuel Macron is set to visit India, where he will hold talks with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and participate in the AI Impact Summit.
Wednesday, Feb. 18: Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is scheduled to arrive in India for a state visit, during which he will also meet with Modi and attend the AI Impact Summit.
Quote of the Week
“I think for the American people, this is the worst thing that can happen.”
—Vance while speaking to reporters on Wednesday, referring to the end of the New START U.S.-Russia nuclear treaty that the Trump administration allowed to lapse last week. Vance added that the administration is “engaging with the Russians” on next steps.
