At the NATO/GMFUS Conference Brussels, 3 October 2002

Closing Remarks by NATO Secretary General, The Rt Hon Lord Robertson of Port Ellen Ladies and gentlemen, on the basis that everything has been said, but not by everyone, I would like first of all to thank all of those who have come here today and participated, especially the speakers who I think have given us much food for thought. I was tempted to give you a summary of each of the speeches with what I thought were the most pertinent points, but I think that would in itself be impertinent and redundant since people have mostly absorbed what has been said. But we saw this as a curtain-raiser for the Prague Summit and I think that has been very much achieved. A lot of the issues have been fleshed out, a lot of the dilemmas that we will have to address and I hope in some cases solve at Prague have been on the Agenda today as well. But I am really grateful and so is NATO and this Institute for the people who have come and spoken today and put a lot of time and effort into the contributions. Now I have got a copy of one of the newswires that has arisen out of this Conference. Reuters are reporting: “NATO’s Robertson sounds alarm on world security. NATO Secretary General predicted on Thursday the world would face more instability, more terrorism, more failed states and more proliferation of weapons in the decade ahead. Painting a bleak picture of what he described as a guaranteed supply chain of instability, Robertson said NATO must revamp its military capabilities”. Now I did say all of that, of course, I did. But I do not know whether Reuters went out after I had raised the alarm bells without listening to the words of reassurance that I did offer, that we know what is going to happen, we have every reason to believe these things could happen, but there are methods by which we can prevent and protect at the same time. And I think that really has to be the focus, not on bleak analysis – after all we have got think tanks full of people with bleak analysts -but we have really got to focus our minds on what we need to do at this time to deal with it. And previous generations were able to do it. And they did set up institutions, very often against the grain of public opinion that have allowed us to get this far into the twenty-first century without the annihilation that we all predicted. I was in university in the 1960’s, like so many other people around here, and I have reached the age of 56 without any life insurance because my generation believed we were not going to last ten years, so what the hell was the point of wasting money on life insurance. And those who were around at that time will remember that sort of doom-laden projection that was the basis of our thinking at that time. But other people previously did not take that view and NATO was created and was a security shield for the whole 40 years of the Cold War. The European Union was set up as the other part of that walnut arising out of Marshall Aid and now we have the European Union, a remarkable even if incomprehensible model of integrating states that over the years and the generations fought each other to a standstill. They were created and they were not necessarily popular institutions at the time. They involved the subordination of massive areas of national sovereignty, from Article 5 of the Washington Treaty right through to the various Treaties that make up the European Union today. And I was looking at some early books about NATO’s birth and I found a speech by a Senator in the United States Senate, at the time when they were debating Article 5, and he said: “We had better beware – this is a method by which the Europeans will get themselves into a war and they will expect America to fight it for them”. How ironic 53 years later, Senator long gone, that Article 5 was actually invoked in order to give an indication of support, a clear signal of support, to the United States as well. So yes, I think we have to ring alarm bells, and so we should, and the 11th September set a whole new set of alarm bells ringing but there are ways in which we can take it beyond that, and I think that among the people who have contributed today we have heard some of the ways in which it can be done. But of course one of the biggest dilemmas, and this is maybe not the room in which it can be addressed, is how do we persuade politicians in the various countries who know the analysis that I gave to be able to sell to people that there are not only warnings that they are required to have but that there are answers to some of these problems. But they are all of them, all of them require investment now in order to have the safety later on and this concept of spending to save is not just related to defence, it is related to every other aspect of humanity from industry to bringing up children. If you do not make the investment, do not be surprised at the end of the day if you have not got a product. I have an answer after my years in politics which go back quite a long time to a mis-spent youth as well and as Javier said, we know, we have lived through it, and that is that you have to go out and sell it. Nothing comes for nothing. Defence does not come for nothing and public support for unpopular policies does not come without effort and energy, and especially if you have got to sell costly and unpalatable solutions today in order to deal with the problems that you will face in the future, then there is no substitute for getting on the doorsteps, or what passes for the doorsteps these days, and that is the television camera, the newspaper and the means by which messages get into people’s homes. And that is what our political leaders are going to have to continue to do. They must make speeches, they must make the case, they have got to go out and sell the long term against the short term imperatives as well. We have heard today about capabilities and it relates to the Europeans’ ambitions as well as to NATO’s need to remain strong and efficient, and I think SACEUR’s speech at lunchtime was not just the generality that we have heard before and you sometimes hear from us, but a military guy being very precise about where the capability gaps are. But I think he made a very valid comment as well, and that is that the Europeans actually do have capabilities. I am as critical and as self critical as anybody who is there. But there are capabilities in existence – a lot of them are the wrong capability but they are capabilities that can be used. The great danger is that as the United States forges ahead in advanced technology and advanced techniques and in transformed thinking, they will act in that way and all that the Europeans will be able to do is to use these capabilities as part of the overall operation, but with a higher share of the risk and in a more primitive form of the fighting that might be necessary to secure us as well. So his lesson, and I think many other lessons, tell us that although yes we must spend more on defence, if you do not reshape the armed forces of countries then you can spend more money and get zero increase in capability. So I am, before Prague, actually writing to every Defence Minister in the Alliance and saying: "Why don’t you examine what you are doing just now, that you do not need to do, in order to free up the resources for the things that we do need, and that you do need, and that we have to have if we are going to deal with the threats of the future”. And that will be difficult – no less difficult for the Europeans as it is for the United States. They cannot close down bases over there for good, raw political reasons and in many cases reducing the size of Europe’s armed forces is a difficult political decision that has to be followed through by making the case, and I know from my own personal bitter experience of what that can mean, when I took a decision in the UK that led to the closure of a factory very close to my own parliamentary constituency. But if you do not do it then somehow you are selling out on the need for the capability that comes. So that reshaping has to take place. So there could be a gap, a very dangerous gap, between what the United States can do and might do in the future and what the Europeans can do in balance inside the Alliance. But there is another gap as well, and that is the gap between ambition and the ability to act. There is not a single government in Europe that does not feel concerned about instability in the Balkans, the prospect of instability in the Caucasus, the dangerous trade in drugs and people, cigarettes and guns that is floating across the centre of Europe at the present moment. There were very few European governments said they did not want to send troops to Afghanistan to be alongside the Americans, but there is a huge gap between what they want to do and what they know people would want them to do at a time of crisis, and the actual ability to deliver on the ground alongside the Americans, and we need to address that as well. It is something paradoxical at this stage in our history when parliaments can be faced with the prospect of making a decision about the deployment of troops. The leaders invest a lot of capital in getting parliamentary decisions and working out the military plans and then they cannot be send because nobody has got the big planes to get them to the location, and the graphic figure that SACEUR gave us at lunch today between what the Europeans have in terms of heavy lift and what the Americans have, is one of the most striking statistics of all. And we need balance in transatlantic relations, I strongly believe, because as so many people have said in questions and in contributions: we want to be able, first of all, to influence the single global super-power, to influence what they do and what priorities they would have and that sometimes will be an influence to get them to do things, as well as the popular view that we have to have influence to stop them doing things. But we cannot have that unless we are able to balance the Alliance. And secondly we have to be able to work together with them in the missions where we feel that there is a joint interest and that we have to be there. And if they move, not just in terms of the hardware of the military, but move to a different way of thinking with the military then there is going to be a real problem and a real crisis as well. So I was one with Javier in his last job and when I was a Defence Minister in dreaming up the idea of ESDP/ESDI and locking together the strengths of the two organisations in this remarkable Agenda that started in St Malo in France, and Alain Richard and I were there at St Malo that Winter’s day when we started on one of the most remarkable reshaping, modernising projects to bring together the unique strengths of these two post-war, post-Second World War, institutions and there is nobody more frustrated than us that it has not been completed. And we can scarcely wonder at the attitude of the Americans. When they took the decision in the last administration; I remember we had to go and sell it to the new administration, that they would make available to the European Union all of NATO’s assets, all of the American heavy lift and jamming equipment and the things that the Americans have that we do not have and are part of NATO’s great asset-base, make it available to the European Union for operations that it would deem to be important inside the European theory. It was one of the great historic bargains, I think, of my generation and we cannot yet complete that final little bit because there are arguments, well known arguments, going on inside Europe that prevent us from getting what we like obscurely to call the Berlin Plus Agenda. But actually the permanent arrangements that will lock together that grand bargain, and the looks of dismay, puzzlement and, I think, sometimes of – well contempt is too strong a word, I think it is - but a real genuine puzzlement that the Europeans can’t get their act together, I think, is one of the great problems. And I share a little bit of the optimism of Javier that before Prague and before Copenhagen we can get a dawning sense of reality and get that Berlin Plus Agenda completed and move on with a project that will help us to rebalance this Alliance as well. So these are a few of my concluding, but not definitive, remarks. No doubt over the next few weeks many of the people in this room will be involved, engaged in making sure that the eight weeks that remain before Prague, and I think, what, the twelve or thirteen weeks before Copenhagen, are well used. One final prediction is: it is not going to be dull. Thank you very much for coming; thank you very much for your contributions.