Morning discussion
NATO after Chicago: Struggling for Capabilities, Enlarge or Regionalize?
The morning session asked the defence ministers of Latvia, Norway, and Italy and the Deputy General Secretary of NATO to discuss the role of NATO with reference to the Euro crisis, Smart Defence, and American strategic rebalancing.
We “have to make sure the economic crisis does not turn into a security crisis,” urged Norwegian Defence Minister Espen Barth Eide. The panel’s discussion moved fluidly between questions of the impacts of the Euro crisis and NATO’s new “Smart Defence” policy. The panellists insisted that the policy is not simply an excuse to spend less on defence in a time of austerity. Artis Pabriks, the Defence Minister of Latvia, argued that states should seek to increase defence spending but do so in an integrated manner. The Minister of Defence of Italy, Giampaolo Di Paola, expanded that point, arguing that it is the ministers’ “responsibility is to use the money we have in the best way we can.”
Julian Lindley-French, a Member of the Atlantic Council of the United States, fired up the discussion by insisting that “we are being strategically complacent in the extreme.” He suggested that with ever-growing cuts of defence budgets and a crisis of confidence in the alliance, “the Europeans are standing on top of the defence cliff.” The threat of the “defence cliff” was acknowledged by Alexander Vershbow, Deputy Secretary General of NATO, but said that it up to NATO to prove Julian Lindley-French wrong.
Minister Pabriks and Deputy Secretary General Vershbow also urged for greater attention to the EU-NATO relationship. Ignoring the relationship between the two institutions is “a hindrance for security in our region and our capabilities globally,” according to Minister Pabriks.
Other topics included the Nordic-Baltic cooperation, the prospect of creating a NATO-China Council, and missile defense in Poland.
Featured video moments
Prof. Julian Lindley-French, Member of the Atlantic Council of the United States: on the necessity of progressive US involvement in Asia: „America today is like Britain in 1890: hugely important on paper, stretched all over the world. What happens in Asia-Pacific right now, specifically in East Asia, will define the world order as much as what happened in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries”.
Espen Barth Eide, Defence Minister of Norway
