HALIFAX, Canada — The impending return of President-elect Donald Trump to the global scene loomed large over this weekend’s Halifax International Security Forum (HFX), a three-day defense-focused confab on the windy, rainy shores of Nova Scotia. 

In the opening session on Friday, HFX President Peter Van Praagh addressed the elephant in the room: “Over the course of the past two weeks, it seems like every one of you in this room called me to ask who was coming from the incoming Trump administration,” he said. “I don’t know. Maybe some of you in this room will go into government.” 

It was a long-winded, slightly awkward way of saying that no one from Trump’s orbit would be in attendance at the conference, which drew 300 participants from more than 60 democratic nations. 

Instead, the speeches and panel discussions talked around Trump. They touted the importance of maintaining strong support for Ukraine, a message geared — sometimes implicitly, sometimes very explicitly — at convincing Trump to stand by the embattled Eastern European nation as its war against Russia approaches the three-year mark. In one session, former Ukrainian parliamentarian Hanna Hopko handed Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD) a shirt that said, “Make Russia small again.”

Attendees from Europe and Canada seemed less shell-shocked than in 2016, when Trump’s victory stunned America’s allies. Now, they knew to prepare for the possibility. (At least, that’s what they said publicly; everyone in the room seemed to acknowledge that how Trump will actually govern is anyone’s guess.)

“We are also better prepared for the second Trump presidency,” said Tobias Lindner, state minister in Germany’s Foreign Ministry. “In 2016 in Europe, many, or most, could not imagine that Trump is elected. Now it was one of two feasible scenarios, and we prepared for both.” 

A delegation of U.S. senators was asked frequently to weigh in on Trump. Even the Republicans did not always agree.

Sens. Jim Risch (R-ID) and Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH), who will lead the Senate Foreign Relations Committee together, praised Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), the secretary of state nominee, and said they would try to confirm him on Jan. 20. In an interview with Jewish Insider, Risch did not make the same promise about confirming former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) as intel chief or Fox News host Pete Hegseth as defense secretary.

Viewed as a strong Trump ally, Risch said he would trust Trump on his promises to end the war in Ukraine, even as Trump has said he would negotiate with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“He has said during the campaign that he’s going to get this over with, and I think we need to give him a space to do that,” Risch told JI. “What does that look like? I have my ideas and so does everybody else, but because of the position I’m in, I don’t want to tread on that. The president needs to sort that out and make the proposals, not us.”

But Rounds took a much more hard-line stance against Putin.

“Any attempt to negotiate with Mr. Putin right now, many of us believe, would be fruitless,” he told reporters. “For those of us out on the outside looking at this, to suggest that we know how you could provide him with any alternative other than defeat is going to be extremely difficult.”

Aside from Ukraine, conference organizers shined a spotlight on democracy. “Democracy = security,” one panel was called. 

“Democratic countries don’t go to war against each other,” Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist and activist, said. “So that will help global security across the globe, if you support people like us. We are better allies to you, compared to all those backward dictators.” 

The Middle East was not a large focus of the conference’s main agenda. But Van Praagh argued in his introductory remarks that Israel’s security, like all global issues, is intricately linked with the war in Ukraine.

“For the third year running, we advance the argument that every international issue is linked to Ukraine’s victory over Putin’s Russia. Taiwan’s security, indeed all of East Asia. Israel’s security and the future of the Middle East. Africa, Latin America,” he said. 

Just as several speakers noted that the war in Ukraine had recently passed 1,000 days, Israeli international lawyer Cochav Elkayam-Levy reminded attendees of the more than 410 days that the Israeli hostages had spent in captivity.

“We have to remember the urgency of these crimes that are continuing all around the world,” Elkayam-Levy, who oversees the Israeli body investigating sexual violence that occurred on Oct. 7, told JI. “It’s happening now also in Israel, with hostages still in captivity, and their families continue to suffer.”

At this pro-democracy forum, the need for Israel to defeat Hamas is baked in.