Remarks

[applause]

JENS STOLTENBERG [NATO Secretary General]: Good morning and dear friends of NATO, it's really a pleasure and honour to be here, especially on this day because, as you all know, exactly on this day, on 4^th April 1949, NATO was founded.  So, this is actually our 69^th birthday and it's great to see you all, so strong and committed friends of NATO here, in Canada.  And also as you all know, Canada was one of the founding members and Canada has contributed to our shared security, to our collective defence, for all these 69 years and I am pleased to see, I'm encouraged to see that Canada has not only contributed to our collective defence, our Alliance, for almost 70 years, but also the fact that Canada has now really stepped up its contributions to the Alliance.  After years of reduction in defence spending, we now see that defence spending is going up.  We see that Canada leads one of our battlegroups, the battlegroup we have deployed to Latvia.  I have visited the Canadian troops there and I am… and I was very impressed by their commitment and by their professionalism, and also the fact that they have chosen to serve so far away from home, contributing to our collective security in a Baltic country, which is far from Canada.  But that reflects the strength of the Alliance, the fact that the Alliance brings North America and Europe together, and nothing shows that stronger than the deployment of North American troops, Canadian troops, to a Baltic country.

I also welcome the fact that NATO has proven to be the most successful Alliance in history because we have been able to change when the world is changing.  And I gave a speech at the university just earlier this morning and I reminded the students on the fact that, for 40 years, NATO did only one thing, we delivered deterrence against the Soviet Union in Europe.  Then the Soviet Union was dissolved, the Warsaw Pact was dissolved, the Cold War ended and the Berlin Wall came down.  And then many people asked, "Do we need NATO anymore?" because the reason why we were established, to deter the Soviet Union, didn’t exist anymore.  But then we soon discovered that NATO had a role to play solving other tasks, especially helping to end… or beyond our borders, managing crises beyond our borders.  And then we went beyond our borders into the Balkans, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and later on also helping to fight terrorism, our biggest military operation ever, as a response to a terrorist attack on the United States, 9/11, and our mission in Afghanistan.  So, for 25 years, from the end of the Cold War in '89, fall of the Berlin Wall, until 2014, our focus was almost only, or at least mainly, on managing crises outside NATO territory, beyond NATO. 

Then 2014 was a new pivotal year for NATO, the world changed again, with the illegal annexation of Crimea, Russia's efforts to destabilise Eastern Ukraine, but also with Daesh, ISIL, emerging as a very strong and dangerous terrorist organisation, controlling big parts of Syria, Iraq, more than seven million people, and NATO had to respond again.  And we responded partly by increasing our collective defence in Europe, Canada is part of that, and partly by stepping up our efforts to fight terrorism.  Not by engaging in big combat operations, but by going in to more training missions because I strongly believe that we have to train local forces to help them stabilise their own country.

So, on the 69^th birthday of NATO, it's very good to see that NATO is vigilant, strong and actually very youthful in a way that we are able to change, adapt when the world is changing, and we will continue to do so, not least with the support of Canada.

So, thank you for inviting me, thank you for having me here today, and congratulations with 4^th April.  Next year, we have our 70^th… we have an anniversary next year and I guess that will be an even bigger celebration all over the Alliance.  But thank you so much for having me.

[applause]