NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte met Chancellor Friedrich Merz in Berlin on Wednesday (9 July 2025), thanking him for Germany’s leading role in the Alliance, and its support to Ukraine.
NATO is a political and military alliance of countries from Europe and North America. Its members are committed to protecting each other from any threat.
NATO condemns Russia's war against Ukraine in the strongest terms. The Alliance remains steadfast in its support for Ukraine, helping to uphold its fundamental right to self-defence.
Read/listen to personal perspectives, expert opinion, analysis and debate on a broad range of security issues. The views expressed by authors are their own.
"NATO first”: A new era for UK defence
10 Jul. 2025The world has fundamentally changed since I was NATO Secretary General in the early 21st century. It would be wrong to label that time as “peaceful” – indeed it saw the first and only ever declaration of NATO’s Article 5 following the 9/11 attacks against the United States – but it was a time in which we were cautiously optimistic about the prospects of long-term global peace and security. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said in 2025. Today, the UK and NATO are facing threats which are more serious and less predictable than at any point since the Cold War.
Future-proofing NATO’s industrial capacity: how decisions at the NATO Summit in The Hague will strengthen the Allied defence industry
26 Jun. 2025At the NATO Summit in The Hague, NATO leaders recognised that in order to deter any future military conflict, Allies will have to pledge to spending 5% of their GDP to defence (of which up to 1.5% may be spent on defence-related investments). This has created the conditions for Allies to channel robust funding into governmental contracts with the defence industry in order to meet the new Capability Targets that are assigned for each Ally to generate collective effect.
NATO’s path to peace and security in an unstable world
12 Jun. 2025As the NATO Summit approaches, we stand at a pivotal moment for our Alliance and our shared mission to safeguard peace. In The Hague, we will evaluate our progress and go even further, cementing our new capability targets and establishing new spending commitments to strengthen our collective defence.
Fortifying the Baltic Sea - NATO’s defence and deterrence strategy for hybrid threats
05 May. 2025Recent events have solidified the Baltic Sea as an area of critical strategic importance. It serves as a vital maritime trading route, hosts considerable networks of Critical Undersea Infrastructure (CUI), and holds significant potential for the development of new sources of energy. As a result, it is also an area which is highly vulnerable to the increasingly prevalent threat of hybrid attacks.