*Everybody wants to play the Donald Trump stage tough guy this season. Look at all that raucous incivility on stage, and among the heavily armed, too.
https://www.politico.eu/article/munich-security-conference-storm-clouds-over-munich/
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Munich has built its reputation as a forum for frank exchange, but this year’s event at times veered toward outright provocation and insult.
Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov dismissed detailed indications in Friday’s U.S. indictment that Moscow had intervened in the U.S. presidential election as “blabber.” U.S. National Security Adviser H.R. McMaster, speaking on the same stage just moments later, said the evidence against Moscow was “incontrovertible” and taunted a Russian cyber expert in the audience.
U.S. Senator James Risch shocked many in the crowd when he said any U.S. response to the North Korean nuclear threat would be “biblical” in nature.
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took the stage on Sunday, he displayed a piece of debris he said was from an Iranian drone which had violated Israeli airspace. “You can take a message back to Tehran,” he told Zarif. “Don’t test Israel’s resolve.”
War of words
Beyond the war of words, there was broad consensus that the world’s political landscape is rapidly shifting, with authoritarianism on the rise and liberal democracy, if not in retreat, at least on the defensive. In addition to the known security threats — the smoldering conflict in Ukraine, widening instability in the Middle East or the nuclear threat posed by North Korea — there was growing unease over unknown, amorphous ones such as cyber and biological warfare....
