Press conference

with NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg and members of the Bundespressekonferenz ''The Warsaw Summit – Adapting NATO in Turbulent Times” - Secretary General's opening remarks

  • 02 Jun. 2016 -
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  • Mis à jour le: 02 Jun. 2016 18:49

(As delivered)

Press conference by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at the Bundespressekonferenz

Thank you so much, and thank you for inviting me and it’s great to be back. I was here, I think, approximately a year ago and for me it is a great opportunity to meet with you and also then to answer some questions.

I’ll be very brief in my introduction.

The reason why I am in Berlin now is that we are preparing for the next NATO Summit which is going to take place in Warsaw 8th and 9th of July.

And that Summit is going to be one of the most important Summits in history of the Alliance.

Just because we are faced with fundamental changes in the security environment. So the way NATO responds to these changes, to more challenging and more dangerous security environment is of great importance and therefore this Summit will be a landmark Summit just because the environment it will take place within.

I expect the Heads of State and Government to make many decisions on many different issues. I expect also Germany to play a key role as it has done over many many years in the Alliance. And I’ve had very fruitful discussing both with Frank-Walter Steinmeier, with Ursula von der Leyen and with Chancellor Angela Merkel yesterday and today and I also had useful meetings in the Bundestag.

There are going to be many decisions and many issues but there are in a way two main themes which will be the main challenges and the main focus of the Summit.

And first theme is everything related to deterrence, defence. And the other main theme is projecting stability beyond our borders.

And I will just briefly go into the main issues, the main messages related to these two main themes.

When it comes to deterrence and collective defence this is NATO’s core responsibility. This is about providing credible deterrence so any adversary knows that an attack on any NATO Ally will trigger the full response from the whole Alliance. And strong defence and strong deterrence is something we think is very important, not because we want to provoke a war but because we want to prevent a war. Strong deterrence, strong defence is the best way to avoid a war because we are sending a very clear signal that we are able to defend all Allies against any potential threat.

Since tensions are increasing and since we see a more assertive Russia, a Russia which has tripled its defence spending since 2000 in real terms, a Russia which has developed many new capabilities, which has modernised its armed forces and most importantly, which has shown the will to use military force in Europe, changing borders in Europe by force for the first time since the Second World War, that requires that NATO is responding. And we are implementing the biggest reinforcements of our collective defence since the end of the Cold War, with a combination of enhanced readiness, preparedness of forces to reinforce, to deploy if needed and with enhanced forward presence of NATO troops in the eastern part of the Alliance.

And we are now discussing how to increase our forward presence. We have a proposal on the table from our military planners, which recommends that we will have a robust multinational battalion in each of the three Baltic countries, and in Poland. And the idea is that this multinational presence will send a clear signal that an attack on one country will then trigger a response from the whole Alliance.

No final decision has been made but I expect Heads of State and Government to take the decisions at the Warsaw Summit. And I welcome that Germany has stated clearly that Germany is ready to lead one of the battalions and provide forces to one of our battalions in one of the Baltic countries.

Then the other main theme will be…I will add one theme and that is that we don’t want a new Cold War, we don’t seek confrontation with Russia. So what we do is defensive, it is proportionate and it’s fully in line with our international obligations including the NATO-Russia Founding Act.

And we do that because we continue to strive to a cooperative and constructive relationship with Russia. We will continue to keep channels for political dialogue open with Russia. We just had a meeting in the NATO-Russia Council some weeks ago, we seek to convene a new meeting on the NATO-Russia Council because we believe that especially tensions are high. It is important to have transparency, predictability and to avoid incidents and accidents like for instance the downing of the Russian plane over Turkey. And if these kind of incidents happen, make sure that they don’t spiral out of control and create really dangerous situations.

So we will continue to pursue and work for a dialogue with Russia because we think that’s important especially in times like the times we are faced with now.

The other main theme is projecting stability to our neighbourhood. And this is relevant for many different kinds of neighbourhood. It’s relevant for neighbours like Ukraine, Moldova, Georgia, where we work with them in modernizing their armed forces. Implementing the reform of their defence institutions and fighting corruption. And the idea is that if our neighbourhood is more stable we are more secure. So this is also in our interest to project stability beyond our borders because that serves our own interest as NATO Alliance.

But projecting stability is also about projecting stability to the south. And that’s everything from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, North Africa. And of course, we speak about different nations, different situations and we can’t have one size fits all. We need tailored approaches. But I think what we do in Afghanistan illustrates what we are aiming at doing more of. And that is to project stability not by deploying NATO forces into combat operations but projecting stability by training local forces. And I think that NATO has to be able to deploy forces in combat operations outside NATO territory also in the future and it may be that we have to do that also in the future and stand ready to do so.

But our focus is more and more on how we can enable local forces to stabilize their own countries, to fight terrorism themselves, and that’s what we do in Afghanistan and that’s what we’re looking into how we can do for instance more of in a country like Iraq. We have started to train Iraqi officers. I hope that the Heads of State and Government at the Summit in Warsaw will give us a mandate to step up, scale up the work we do to try to enable countries in the Middle East, North Africa, to stabilize their own countries, to fight ISIL themselves because in the long run that’s a more sustainable answer than we deploying our combat forces and fighting their wars. So this is the second main theme, how can NATO do more in support of the US led coalition to fight ISIL, how can NATO do more in general to stabilize our neighbourhood both in the east and in the south.

The last thing I’ll just briefly mention. The EU-NATO cooperation will also be one of the main issues at the Summit and I expect us to be able to make progress and to lift the cooperation to a new level.

But I think the best thing now is to stop and to leave the time for questions, so…thank you so much.