Article snippet: Photo Vice President Mike Pence on Saturday at the Munich Security Conference. Credit Johannes Simon/Getty Images MUNICH — They came from all over — diplomats and generals, policy experts and security officials — seeking clues to President Trump’s ideas and intentions. They left without much reassurance.As the Munich Security Conference, the world’s pre-eminent foreign policy gathering, ended on Sunday, it was notable that even the foreign ministers of China and Iran had taken questions, while Vice President Mike Pence and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis stuck to prepared statements.An audience anxious for signals about the Trump administration’s stances on NATO, the European Union, Germany and the Russia of President Vladimir V. Putin, whom Mr. Trump so openly admires, was only minimally soothed. It mostly heard boilerplate assurances about United States commitments of the kind that previous American administrations had rarely felt the need to give.Even Mr. Pence, who could say that he carried a direct message of reassurance from Mr. Trump, did not manage to comfort many of the experts here. Keen observers of Washington, they were deeply disturbed by Mr. Trump’s difficulty finding a pliant national security adviser to replace Michael T. Flynn, and by Mr. Trump’s long and rambling news conference on Thursday, which was followed on Saturday by a campaign-style rally where he suggested, wrongly, that something terrible had ... Link to the full article to read more