Remarks

So Secretary Shanahan, dear Patrick,

It’s great to see you here at NATO HQ, following your hospitality when I met you in Washington just a couple of weeks ago.

And it is great to have you here because I know you are so committed to NATO, you are really showing leadership for this Alliance. And we are going to this meeting, to this wide range of timely and pressing security issues for the Alliance.

Including the INF Treaty. Russia continues to violate the Treaty and we need to plan for a world without the Treaty and with more Russian missiles.

Burden-sharing: all Allies agree that we need to improve burden-sharing in the Alliance, And we are inspired by what we see. European Allies and Canada are investing more, adding 100 billion extra US dollars for defence, for 2016 to 2020.

And then of course NATO missions and operations, including in Afghanistan and Iraq. And you visited Iraq and Afghanistan early this week, and we look forward to listen to you, to your assessments and to your reports on how you assess the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the NATO missions there.

So once again, welcome to NATO, to the Headquarters and I look forward to be able to meet with you at the NATO defence ministerial.