Please read this commentary on the MSC 2026. It is a boring but nightmarish event that has foreclosed any real room for discussion beyond permanent war preparations with nothing concrete to show for in terms of “security,” least of all genuine efforts at dialogue.

What Oberg hints at, and what MSC 2026 confirms, is how much the epistemic environment has changed. In the 1960s and 1970s, Western elites were still permeable to outside and inside pressure, from a real left, from non‑aligned states, from peace and disarmament movements. The “threat from the left” created incentives to keep some channels to adversaries open and to stage real, if limited, dialogue. The old MSC format depended on that: you invited those you feared, precisely because their existence forced you to think beyond your own echo chamber.

Today’s MSC is almost the opposite: the current epistemic bubble has hardened into a bunker. The “outside” (whether other countries that are non-NATO, non-allied, whether national opposition) is no longer a partner or even a necessary antagonist; it is simply excluded. What remains is a carefully curated inner circle that talks only to itself about how to manage, contain and out‑arm the rest of the world, and now, increasingly, how to discipline its own societies to accept endless militarization as the only horizon.

I will add my own observations and notes on MSC 2026 soon. Meanwhile, Jan Oberg reminds us what has been lost and what we need to regain: