Wolfgang Ischinger has transformed the Munich Security Conference into an elite global gathering —

 In diplomacy, Europe’s most powerful ambassador means business

Wolfgang Ischinger has transformed the Munich Security Conference into an elite global gathering — and done rather well for himself in the process.

BY MATTHEW KARNITSCHNIG

February 16, 2022 6:13 pm

MUNICH

It was the kind of tense moment that Wolfgang Ischinger was born to defuse. The veteran German diplomat and chairman of the annual Munich Security Conference was hosting a meeting between leaders from the Balkans and senior European and American diplomats when anger bubbled up over the slow progress countries from the region were making toward joining the European Union. 

“You have to tell us if you want us or not,” Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić said in the direction of the Europeans with visible frustration, according to witnesses. “We have no promises from anyone in Europe.” 

The A-list participants in the room included Andreas Michaelis, the powerful deputy German foreign minister, and Philip T. Reeker, a senior official from the U.S. State Department with responsibility for the region. Ischinger and his team couldn’t afford for the high-profile meeting to go off the rails. 

“Let’s be positive and take things forward,” Ischinger told Vučić in soothing tones, adding how happy he was that his conference had managed to pull off a “family reunion of the western Balkans.”

What Ischinger didn’t mention that day in February 2020 — and what few in the room atop Munich’s ritzy Bayerischer Hof hotel knew — was that the ambassador had a private commercial interest in the meeting’s success.  

Kosovo, represented at the gathering by its president and new prime minister, had been a client of Agora Strategy Group, the “boutique consultancy” that Ischinger founded in 2015. Just weeks before the conference, a new government had taken office in Kosovo and Agora was keen to keep the relationship alive.

As a diplomat, Ischinger had worked in the Balkans. But at such gatherings he had more than regional stability on his mind, a former associate said: “He wanted to make money.”  

Since his departure from Germany’s foreign service nearly 15 years ago, the ambassador has transformed the Munich Security Conference from a sleepy annual gathering of Cold Warriors and foreign policy wonks into a year-round traveling circus of global elites, populated by dozens of heads of state from Joe Biden to the president of Estonia, titans of Silicon Valley including Mark Zuckerberg, and even the likes of U2 frontman Bono. At this year’s instalment, which gets underway on Friday, U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris will be among the guests of honor. 

For Ischinger, however, the proceedings are about more than lofty debates on global issues or high-profile elbow-rubbing. The éminence grise of Germany’s foreign policy establishment, he has parleyed the ready access the conference gives him to the wood-paneled world of high-level politics into a lucrative sideline of peddling advice, access and lobbying to many of the same individuals, governments and institutions involved in the MSC, according to public filings and people familiar with his business dealings.  

Those activities have blurred the lines between his public and private roles and created a minefield of conflicts of interest, critics — including some former colleagues — say. Though legally structured as an independent nonprofit, the Munich Security Conference depends on the German government for both funding and legitimacy, making the role of chairman, in practice if not by law, a public one. Not only do government representatives sit on the MSC’s oversight committees, for example, but the German army provides logistics for the event, which is broadcast around the world by Deutsche Welle, a government-owned news channel.  

“From a governance perspective, it’s highly questionable because the German government has effectively granted him its official seal of approval, which he has used to meld public and private interests,” said a former associate of Ischinger who, like others familiar with his stewardship of the conference, spoke on condition of anonymity. 

Ischinger insists he has adhered to the highest ethical standards as chairman and rejects suggestions that he has ever put his own interests above those of the conference. 

“I’ve done my best over 14 years to ensure that there is no commingling of the duty to the Munich Security Conference with personal enrichment,” he said at a press conference to preview this week’s event.

‘Military-Science Encounter’

The son of a notary, Ischinger was born a year after World War II ended and grew up in southwest Germany near Stuttgart. His was the generation of West Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder, the “economic miracle” of the 1950s and 1960s that the country experienced as it rebuilt from the rubble of the war. 

Spared the horrors of the war, if not its long-term repercussions for Germany, Ischinger came of age firmly embedded in the Western fold. After studying in Europe and the U.S., he joined the staff of the U.N. Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim in 1973.  

Ischinger’s biggest break came in 1982, when he became the personal assistant to Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the legendary West German foreign minister who played a central role in bringing about German reunification. The job gave Ischinger a front-row seat at many of the events that have shaped our time, including what he has described as the highlight of his career, when in 1989 he accompanied a train full of East Germans who had taken refuge at the West German embassy in Prague to their freedom in the West. It was a watershed moment in the events that preceded the collapse of the Iron Curtain.   

Ischinger’s proximity to Genscher, the longtime leader of Germany’s liberal Free Democrats, vaulted him to the top tier of the country’s diplomatic corps. He would rise to become a deputy foreign minister during Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s government as well as ambassador to the U.S., a post he started on September 11, 2001. 

Ischinger took the reins of the Munich Security Conference in 2008 at the request of the government. He had just capped his diplomatic career with the plum post of German ambassador to the United Kingdom (or, as he likes to put it, “to the Court of St. James’s”). He was quick to recognize the conference’s potential. 

Founded as a quiet conclave for Western security officials (both Henry Kissinger and Helmut Schmidt, the future German chancellor, attended the first meeting, held just one week after the Kennedy assassination in 1963) the “Internationale Wehrkunde-Begegnung” (International Military-Science Encounter), as the MSC was then known, was started by Ewald-Heinrich von Kleist, a German aristocrat who had taken part in the failed conspiracy to assassinate Hitler in 1944.  

Von Kleist envisaged the meeting as a roundtable discussion “between equal and active participants” on policy and strategy within the NATO alliance. Wehrkunde quickly became a fixed point on the transatlantic calendar, attracting prominent U.S. senators, security analysts and commentators.  

While the conference had lost some of its cachet in the years before Ischinger’s arrival, it remained an important date on the diplomatic agenda. Just a year before Ischinger took over, Russian President Vladimir Putin had delivered a landmark address in Munich, in which he made clear that Russia didn’t trust the West, a moment many see as a harbinger for what was to come. 

Under Ischinger, the Munich Security Conference has gone more global. Instead of taking a purely transatlantic focus, he widened its scope both geographically as well as thematically, to consider the impact of problems such as climate change and poverty on security. 

But while the conference remains a forum for thoughtful transatlantic dialogue, at least on the sidelines, the official program has moved more in the direction of what von Kleist had hoped to avoid: “endless speeches by politicians who enjoy speaking.”