Doorstep statement

I just had a very good and productive meeting with Prime Minister Cameron.

And I commended him for his personal commitment and leadership in NATO and his strong commitment to security and the important role UK is playing in NATO in many different ways.

UK contributes to our collective defence, to air policing in the Baltic region, to increased readiness and preparedness of our forces. United Kingdom also contributes to different NATO missions, in Afghanistan, but also now in contributing to our presence in the Aegean Sea, helping Greece, Turkey, the European Union to cope with the migrant and refugee crisis.

And of course, UK is leading the way when it comes to defence spending. Upholding defence spending at at least 2 percent of GDP. That is of great importance, and I welcome the very strong commitment of the United Kingdom to maintain defence spending at this level.

We discussed how NATO must continue to adapt to a more dangerous world, caused by the threats from ISIL, from proliferation of nuclear weapons, and from a more assertive Russia. And we agreed that we should step up both our efforts to fight terrorism, to fight ISIL, but also of course to further enhance our collective defence, and to work together in missions like the presence of NATO ships in the Aegean Sea and our operation in Afghanistan.

We also agreed on the importance of strengthening the cooperation between NATO and the European Union. NATO and the European Union are two organisations which are vital and which are working closely together in many different areas, and I would welcome even closer cooperation between NATO and the European Union.

We also addressed many other issues, but I think these are the most important ones.

QUESTION: Following your talks today, how confident are you that the Prime Minister has done enough to convince the British people to vote to stay in the European Union in June?

SECRETARY GENERAL:

I will not comment on the ongoing debate in the United Kingdom on whether the United Kingdom is going to stay or not in the European Union. That is up to the people of Britain to decide.

But what I can do is to say what matters for NATO.

And a strong United Kingdom in Europe is good for our security, it’s good for NATO, and I welcome that.  

And a more fragmented Europe is bad for our security and it’s bad for NATO.

And we have to understand that NATO and the European Union are complementing each other, are complementary in the way that we saw, for instance, when we responded to Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine.

Then the European Union implemented the economic sanctions, while NATO delivered deterrence, increased collective defence. And both of these measures are of great importance, delivered by NATO and by the European Union.

We also see the importance of the United Kingdom being so supportive both inside NATO and inside the European Union, promoting increased cooperation between NATO and the European Union.

QUESTION: Yesterday, Russian fighter jets buzzed a US warship. They came within 9 metres. What is your reaction to that, and how concerned are you that this stand-off is getting dangerously close to one side or other actually pulling a trigger?

SECRETARY GENERAL:

This kind of behaviour is unsafe, and unprofessional. And that’s the reason why I have, for a long time now, underlined the importance of more transparency, more predictability and increased efforts on risk reductions.

Because we have seen substantial, significant increases in military activity along our borders. And we have to avoid incidents, and accidents, and if they happen, we have to make sure they don’t spiral out of control.

We will have a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council next week, and one of the issues we will discuss in the NATO-Russia Council next week is military activity, with focus on transparency and risk reduction.

And I think the incident we had in the Baltic Sea just underlines the importance of a strong focus on risk reduction and transparency.

QUESTION: [inaudible]… de-escalate the situation?

SECRETARY GENERAL:

What we are doing is that we are making sure that we are behaving in a safe and predictable and transparent way. And we are also working on how we can enhance and develop mechanisms for risk reduction.

This is also something we address in Vienna, where we are discussing in the OSCE framework, how to modernise what is called the Vienna Document, which is an agreement on how we have transparency, how we have military-to-military lines of communications to make sure that this kind of dangerous situation do not occur.

And we will step up our efforts to make sure that we are able to modernise, to improve these different mechanisms of military-to-military lines of communications.