Secretary General Stoltenberg: Thanks so much and good afternoon.
It’s really a great honor and a great pleasure to see you all today and
to be able to speak to you, because I know that the
Oxford Union has
really been a --a platform for free speech and for open debate for almost
two hundred years. And for me, to be able to speak to you is really an
honor because free speech and open society is what
NATO is there to
defend. That’s our core value -- is to defend open and free societies.
And I also would like to tell you that there are many [alumni] from
Oxford that have -- and people who have been members of this union for
many years that have served in NATO for many years. One, [a] general called
Wesley Clark -- he was our Supreme Allied Commander for some years, and
he is a Oxford Union member. And also my Assistant Secretary General --
sitting there,
Patrick Turner -- he’s responsible for operations and he...is a member of the Union.
He studied here. And he told me just now that
he studied
Medieval History and Medieval War, and then he started to
work for NATO, which also -- How should I say? -- not only good news.
So,
my task, or what I will do today, is that I will try to be brief, not
too long, and to share with you some reflections on NATO and how NATO is
adapting to a new and more demanding security environment. And after
that, I’m happy to take questions and answer. So, to have time for that,
I’ll try to be brief and, not covering all the issues, but at least
pointing out some of the main challenges we face as...an alliance today.
And NATO’s core task, being a military and political alliance, is to
defend and protect all allies --
28 member states from Europe, and [the] U.S., and
Canada. And we do so by -- by protecting and defending each other while
standing together based on the principle or the idea of “one for all,
and all for one.” And this idea or this principle is enshrined in our
founding treaty, the Washington Treaty,1
in something called
Article 5,
which is our collective defense clause. And the main message there is
that an attack on one ally would be regarded as an attack on all allies,
on the whole alliance. So by standing together, and promising to defend
each other, we are strong and we have been able to contribute to peace
and stability in Europe for almost seventy years and to be the strongest
alliance in history, protecting all allied countries.
We have done -- We have done so
under very different circumstances. For approximately forty years, we
did that during the Cold War, from our foundation in 1949 until the end
of the Cold War with the fall of the Berlin --
Berlin Wall in 1989, and then
elated, the dissolution of -- of the Soviet Union.
But during the Cold War, we
had a big confrontation between NATO, the United States on one side, and
then the Soviet Union and the
Warsaw Pact on the other side. And we
successfully were able to deter the Soviet Union and the Cold War ended
without any shot being fired, and -- and we started after the end of the Cold
War to try to build a partnership with Russia. We enlarged more and more
of those countries that were previously members of the Warsaw Pact. They
became NATO members. And people started also to ask whether we needed
NATO anymore, because the reason why we existed, to confront the
Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact, didn’t exist anymore.
But then we soon discovered that it was still a...need, still a reason to
keep NATO as a strong alliance, because we saw that we had instability
around our borders close to NATO allies, first in the Balkans, where we
had a civil war in the 1990’s, or several wars in the 1990’s, and NATO
moved into Bosnia and Herzegovina with a big military operation. We...went
into Kosovo to preserve, or to...end the war and to preserve the peace and
stability in the Balkans. That was, of course, important for our own
security because the fighting and the civil war we saw in the Balkans
was also a direct threat to NATO allied countries.
Then we moved into -- And then we conducted a
big military operation in Afghanistan after [the]
attacks on the United
States, 9/11. We have been fighting piracy off the Horn of Africa,
conducted air strikes in Libya, and we have done what we, in the NATO
language, call “crisis management” or “projecting stability” beyond our
borders, because when our neighbors are stable, then we are more secure.
So for about twenty five years, we didn’t focus so much on collective
defense in Europe because the Soviet Union was not there. We didn’t see a
real threat coming from Russia. And we focused on crisis management,
projecting stability beyond our borders: Afghanistan, the Balkans, and
other places in the world.
Then the world changed again with a more
assertive Russia, with Russia using force first in Georgia, then later
on in 2014, against Ukraine, illegally annexing Crimea.
And then NATO
was called upon again. And then we -- we are now faced with the double
challenge of both, continuing to project stability beyond our borders
with actually more instability, more violence close to NATO borders:
Iraq, Syria, ISIL and North Africa. And Afghanistan is still a challenge
for us. So we have to continue to do crisis management, project
stability beyond our borders, but at the same time we have to do more
collective defense in Europe. So we have in a way, not the luxury of
choosing either crisis management beyond our borders or collective
defense in Europe. We have to do both at the same time.
That’s exactly
what NATO now is doing. We are adapting NATO to a new and different
world. We are increasing our strength in Europe. We have implemented the
biggest reinforcement to our collective defense since the end of the
Cold War. We have increased the readiness and responsiveness of our
forces. We have tripled the size of something we call the “NATO Response
Force,” a force which is able to reinforce to deploy quickly. And then,
we have also for the first time deployed forces, so we are in the
process of deploying forces, to the eastern part of the Alliance with
the battle groups in the three Baltic countries, and to Poland and also
increased presence in the south east of the Alliance. We do this because
for us it is, of course, a co-responsibility is to continue to provide
the necessary deterrents to prevent the war, not to provoke a war and we
have adapted to a more assertive Russia, being responsible for
aggressive action in Ukraine.
The important thing to remember is that, what NATO does is defensive, it
is proportionate and we don’t want a new Cold War. We don’t seek
confrontation with Russia and we, therefore, keep the channels for
political dialogue open with Russia. And we are not strengthening our
defense because we want to fight the war, but we are delivering strong
deterrents because we now that’s the best way to prevent a war. At the
same time, we are also now starting to increase defense spending because
this has a cost, so we decided at our
summit in Wales in 2014, that we
needed to invest more in our defenses. And some countries already meet
the NATO target of spending 2 per cent or more on defense. The UK is
among those countries, the United States is another. But most of the
NATO allies do not spend 2 per cent, they spend less than 2 per cent of
GDP on defense.
So one of my, or perhaps, my main priority since
I
became Secretary General of NATO back in 2014, has been to urge member
allies to invest more in defense. The good news is that they have
actually started to do so. After many years of decline, defense spending
have started to increase and there’s a long way to go, there’s still
much to do, but at least, it is a good thing to see that more and more
allies understand that they have to invest more in our security when
times are changing, and when we see a more challenging and demanding
security environment. In addition to doing more on collective defense in
Europe, increasing our presence in the eastern part of the Alliance, we
have also stepped up our efforts to fight terrorism and to stabilize our
neighborhood.
We continue in Afghanistan our biggest military operation
ever. We support the effort of the coalition fighting ISIL. We train
Iraqi officers. We provide support with our AWACS surveillance planes to
planes from the UK and from the United States, and from other countries
conducting airstrikes over Syria and Iraq against DAESH or ISIL. And we
also work with other countries in the region like Jordan and Tunisia to
help them being able to fight terrorism and to stabilize their own, or
to maintain their own countries, as stable countries in the region. We
are also present in the Mediterranean. We have deployed ships to the
Aegean Sea to help cut the lines of illegal trafficking of the Aegean
Sea.
The reason why I tell you all this is just to illustrate that NATO has
been able to adapt and to change. The world has changed, so NATO has
changed and we are doing both a collective defense in Europe but we
stepped our op at the same time, our efforts to stabilize our
neighborhood. And that’s perhaps the most important thing, is that NATO
has proven again and again that when the security environment changes,
we are also able to change. We are changing the way we are delivering
our core tasks. But our core tasks remains exactly the same that by
standing together, by being strong and by defending each other, we make
sure that all allies are safe and by that also, preserving peace and
stability in Europe and North America. So for NATO, it is important to
continue to be united and that’s the most important strength of our
Alliance. I will stop there to make sure that we have time for some
questions.