Some places have more history than is good for them. The Bavarian capital of Munich has certainly had its fair share, from the traumatic Swedish occupation during the Thirty Years War, through to the Weimar period, when the city notoriously helped to incubate Hitler, the destruction of the Second World War, and then the infamous Olympics of 1972, at which members of the Israeli team were kidnapped and murdered.

The Munich Security Conference (MSC), which met last weekend, is a gathering ostensibly devoted to the present and the future rather than the past. History, one might think, is made, not discussed, there. In 2007, for example, the Russian leader Vladimir Putin delivered a sulphurous speech settling accounts with the West and warning of his intention to take action against Russia’s supposed tormentors. Seven years later, in 2014, the then German President Joachim Gauck delivered a landmark speech announcing that his country would have to do more on the world stage. Then in 2025, US Vice President JD Vance shocked the conference with his broadside suggesting that a civilisationally bankrupt Europe might not be worth defending.

In fact, for all the frenetic focus on the here and now that one would expect at the world’s most important Security Conference – dubbed ‘Davos with guns’ – the crowded halls of the Bayerischer Hof were haunted by history. The past was everywhere, both as inspiration and as warning. It started with the three covers of the MSC’s ‘Daily Agenda’. Friday’s featured an original section of the Berlin Wall, which now stands in the Englischer Garten; Saturday’s a picture of the military graves at the Munich Waldfriedhof, where dead from both world wars are buried; and Sunday’s depicted a bronze sculpture which commemorates the forced evacuation of Dachau prisoners in April 1945, during which more than 1,000 of them died.

You found the past all over the big set-piece appearances by world leaders, especially in US Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s speech – trepidatiously awaited by the Europeans. This turned out to be mainly a history lecture on the depth of the transatlantic connection beginning with Columbus. Rubio spoke of ‘history’s constant reminder that ultimately our destiny is and will always be intertwined with yours’ – lines which were received with applause – and insisted that ‘we are defending a great civilisation that has every reason to be proud of its history’.

Rubio called on both sides of the Atlantic to be ‘unapologetic in our heritage and proud of this common inheritance’. Turning to the history of the United States, he highlighted the contribution of the English, Spanish, Scots-Irish, French and the ‘German farmers and craftsmen who transformed empty plains into a global agricultural powerhouse’. The Native Americans might beg to differ about the ‘empty’, but it is a point of view.

Rubio’s speech was much debated throughout the conference, but as much for what it said about the past as about the present or future. In a subsequent panel on the ‘European Dream’, the moderator Natalie Tocci from the Italian Institute of International Affairs began by observing not only that ‘Europe has a history’, but that the continent now defines itself in opposition to that past, with its worlds wars, Holocaust, and tradition of imperialism. The panel on the distortion of Holocaust memory on both left and right today, chaired by Michaela Kuechler, Secretary General of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, and which featured Ted Deutch, the CEO of the American Jewish Committee, was a timely reminder that this past is by no means behind us, sadly.

Here, indeed, was the transatlantic divide encapsulated. America was appealing to a common past; Europe was trying to transcend it. At best, MSC Europeans and Trump Americans see themselves as heirs to different strands of history. Franziska Brantner, a German Green Party politician, stressed that, contrary to Rubio, she saw Europe’s roots as lying in the Enlightenment. The chasm is not unbridgeable, however. Brantner’s fellow panellist, the Croatian Prime Minister Andrej Plenković, emphasised the importance of Christianity. If all this sounds a bit Eurocentric, the foreign ministers of Japan and the People’s Republic of China clashed over the history of the Second World War, or rather its memory, which the latter brought up in order to punish Japanese Prime Minister Takaichi for her support for Taiwan.

The past was also omnipresent in the many side panels that give the Conference its distinctive flavour. Malaysia’s wily National Security Advisor, Dato Abidin, reminded us tartly that China and India were not ‘rising powers’ in the condescending western parlance, but ‘returning’ ones who are merely resuming the great power status that they had enjoyed until the onset of western imperialism. In a panel on supply chain security, the man who coined the phrase ‘weaponised interdependence’, Abraham Newman, called for the establishment of a new geo-economic ‘Hanseatic League’.

Off-stage, and in the confidential sessions, the past resonated in small things: in the military delegation from a small, fiercely neutral European country, now in uniform at Munich for the first time, on account of being menaced; and in the very senior Polish politician, who remarked that, while Britain had certainly influenced, and continues to influence the Baltic, it had always been a two-way affair. Did we know, for example, that the English word for a ‘Spruce’ tree came about because, when asked where the mast timbers for ships came from, the Polish merchants replied ‘from Prussia’, or ‘Z Sprus’? (We didn’t).

The past was to the fore in the events put on by the Ax:son Johnson Institute for Statecraft and Diplomacy, which has done so much to promote historical understanding among decision-makers (full disclosure: I am a member). These grappled with the question of which parallels shed light on our present predicament – appeasement, Cold War or neither – and how to apply those insights to, for example, closing the capability gaps that bedevil the mission to deter Russia. Significantly, none of the participants suggested that history provided all the answers, merely that it enabled us to start asking the right questions.

This also came across powerfully in Francis J. Gavin’s MSC Bookstore talk on his most recent work, Thinking Historically: A Guide to Statecraft and Strategy. It is also possible, he argues, for decision-makers to have ‘too much history’, which can induce a kind of ‘vertigo’ fatal to good judgment. After all, it is not the volume or even the quality of the historical knowledge available to them that is decisive, but the speed and skill with which they make use of it. There is an inherent tension, Henry Kissinger once said, between building up the knowledge necessary to make a good decision and making that decision in time to make any difference.

As the policy makers at Munich know, the past can point us in two different directions. A decision taken too quickly leads us to 1914, and to the Waldfriedhof; yet one delayed too long ends in Dachau or worse. In this context, those sombre covers of the MSC ‘Daily Agendas’, with their evocations of the World Wars, are a timely reminder of what happens when we get those choices wrong.