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Updated: 06-May-2003 NATO Speeches

Montreal

6 May 2003

Innovating in an Uncertain World

Speech by NATO Secretary General, Lord Robertson
at the 9th Conference de Montreal

Ladies and Gentlemen,
Mesdames et Messieurs,


I am very pleased to be here. At a time when newspapers are full of warnings that Europe and North America are pulling apart, it is good to be in Montreal, a city that brings together the best of the old and the new worlds.

Au cours des neuf dernières années, la Conférence de Montréal a acquis une solide réputation en tant que forum où de hauts responsables, des hommes d’affaires et des spécialistes se réunissent pour discuter des grandes questions concernant l’économie internationale. C’est un domaine vaste et complexe.

Si les organisateurs de la conférence m’ont demandé d’y prendre la parole cette année, c’est qu’ils ont conscience qu’aujourd’hui, plus que jamais, l’économie et la sécurité internationales sont étroitement liées.

This is not a new idea. On the contrary, NATO was in a sense founded on that principle.

In 1948, the Marshall Plan provided “seed money” to help European economies recover. A year later, NATO was created as the security umbrella under which Western Europe could get back on its feet, and become an economic and political partner to North America.

The result? Today, Canada, the United States and Europe represent the richest group of countries in the world. They are each others’ greatest trading partners, and biggest direct investors. They are also solid democracies, sharing common values and an unbreakable bond of Alliance, the core of our free, democratic and prosperous world.

But, you might say, the headlines are still about transatlantic discord, separation or even divorce.

My response is to ask you to look beyond day-to-day family quarrels and to focus instead on the big picture.

Because there is, in fact, broad, deep and strong consensus, within Europe and across the Atlantic, on the key security questions of the 21st century. And it is a consensus being formed in and by NATO.

The big picture is one of real and widespread NATO transformation. What we achieved before and at our November 2002 Summit in Prague was well and fairly reported at the time.

But even the experts now seem to have forgotten, so let me set out briefly the components of our current and continuing consensus.

The starting point is a common perspective on both sides of the Atlantic about the challenge for 21st century security. We live in a new era which began when the Berlin Wall fell and has continued to evolve ever since.

The first hallmarks of this new era is greater instability. The disintegration of Yugoslavia was the first step.

In our increasingly globalised world, instability cannot be confined to the areas in which it originates. It affects us all, wherever we live.

Take Afghanistan. Under the Taliban, it exported instability to its neighbours, drugs to Europe, terrorism and refugees throughout the world. And if the international community does not remain fully engaged, we can expect the same symptoms of overspill to reappear.

The scale of threats has also increased. Today terrorism is more international, more apocalyptic in its vision, and far more lethal.

And despite the best efforts of our diplomats and counter-proliferation experts, the spread of bio-chemical and nuclear weapons is already a defining security challenge of this new century.

If not addressed, it will put more fingers on more triggers. And because not all of these fingers will belong to rational leaders, traditional deterrents will not always deter.

All this adds up to a guaranteed supply chain of instability. It adds up to a security environment in which threats can strike at anytime, without warning, from anywhere and using any means, from a box-cutter to a chemical weapon to a missile.

In the months leading to Prague, NATO’s 19 member countries demonstrated that they understood the nature of this challenge and were united in a common response to it.

What this has meant in practice for the Alliance can be summarised under three headings: new roles, new relationships and new capabilities.

NATO is worth retaining only if it is relevant. It evolved successfully in the 1990s to engage former adversaries across the old Soviet bloc and then to deal with instability and ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.

Now NATO is radically changing again to play important new roles in the fight against terrorism and weapons of mass destruction.

It already provides the common glue of military interoperability without which multinational operations of any kind would be impossible. Canada’s Joint Task Force 2 and Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry were able to operate effectively against the Taliban and Al Qaida in Afghanistan only because of decades of cooperation in NATO.

After 9/11, NATO also played a supporting role in actions against Al Qaida. Most importantly, however, NATO at Prague became the focal point for planning the military contribution against terrorism, a major new role and one which no other organisation in the world could play.

In doing so, we have put an end to decades of arid theological debate about whether the Alliance could operate outside Europe. NATO now has a mandate to deal with threats from wherever they may come.

We do not pretend to be a world policeman. But we are no longer solely Europe’s neighbourhood cop.

If these new roles are to be more than an aspiration, NATO must also retool with new capabilities. As we have seen on our television screens, modern warfare is demanding in new ways: precision weapons, real time intelligence, deploying and sustaining forces over long distances and for prolonged periods.

We are having to replace a Cold War sumo wrestler with a 21st century fencer.

For NATO that means new capabilities to defend against chemical and biological weapons, give commanders a surveillance picture of the ground battlefield, and increase our heavy airlift and air tanker fleets.

All of this will help to close the capabilities gap that has opened between the US and its Allies.

That gap is not a myth of the military establishment. Take airlift: the US has 250 long range transport aircraft; the UK has 4; the rest of NATO, including Canada, none at all. How will our forces get to places like Afghanistan quickly, safely and cost effectively if we do not do better?

To close the gap, NATO’s nineteen Presidents and Prime Ministers signed up at Prague to a series of firm and specific political commitments to develop and acquire these and other capabilities.

That’s not easy in today’s economic climate. But I am keeping their feet to the fire and I am confident that they will deliver. After all, acquiring these capabilities multinationally with your Allies is far cheaper than doing so on your own.

Equally important was the decision to create a NATO Response Force, a multinational quick-reaction force with cutting edge technology to act as the point of the fencer’s foil.

Militarily, the new NATO Response Force will enable NATO to meet today’s threats with today’s capabilities.

Politically, it will send a message that all NATO Allies are collectively prepared to take part in demanding operations at the high end of the conflict spectrum – a vital point in meeting the criticism that America has to be unilateralist because Europe and Canada are incapable.

Linked to new roles and new capabilities is the third leg of NATO’s transformation agenda: new partnerships.

Here too the achievements have real significance,

During 2002, we launched the biggest round of enlargement in NATO’s history. Seven new countries will join the Alliance next year.

For some discussions, they are already sitting around the NATO Council table.

In parallel, we hammered in the final nail in the coffin of the Cold War by creating a NATO-Russia Council where 20 nations are working together as equal partners.

This is solid cooperation on some of today’s big issues: terrorism, theatre-missile defence and peacekeeping.

Within a month of the Prague Summit, we finalised our permanent military linkages with the European Union.

No longer are NATO and the EU living in the same city but on different planets. In March, the EU took over NATO’s small peacekeeping mission in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (1).

This is the EU’s first military operation but it is being mounted using NATO assets and with NATO’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander in command; an example of institutional cooperation which puts the lie to the common perception of zero-sum transatlantic competition.

Finally, NATO remains at the centre of a web of partnerships involving a total of 46 states across North America, Europe and into the Caucasus and Central Asia.

These are working partnerships which benefit all sides, and have turned NATO and its 27 Partners for Peace into the world’s largest permanent coalition.

So 2002 was an extraordinary year of transformation for the Atlantic Alliance.

2003 has however been the year to put the new NATO into practice. While the pundits spread doom and gloom, NATO has been getting down to its new business.

When Turkey felt threatened this year by Saddam Hussein, NATO deployed AWACS early warning aircraft, anti-missile systems and chem-bio defences.

You will no doubt remember the blaze of negative publicity that surrounded the initial planning decision. You probably do not know that we took that undeniably contentious decision in eleven days, a shorter time than needed for a similar decision at the time of the Gulf War in 1991.

Nor will you have seen or heard much of the operation itself, which we brought to a successful close last month. Yet this was a real good news story: NATO doing its job of protecting its members effectively and without fuss.

It should not surprise people when NATO meets its Treaty commitments. For NATO to begin operations in Afghanistan would once have raised many eyebrows.

But the trailblazing decision taken last month that NATO will from the summer take responsibility for the International Security Assistance Force in Kabul passed by with barely a comment.

Perhaps that is because we have become used to NATO Allies taking the lion’s share of this important part in the rebuilding of Afghanistan, led at the moment by a German-Dutch headquarters.

This headquarters already relies heavily on NATO planning and other support. From August, at the request of Germany, the Netherlands and Canada – which is then taking on a very prominent role in ISAF – NATO will take on the command, coordination and planning of the complete operation.

Our decision is good for Afghanistan. It is evidence of international commitment and a determination to stay engaged. And it brings to bear NATO’s decade of experience in complex and dangerous peacekeeping missions in the Balkans.

The decision is good for countries like Canada which want to play lead roles in international operations of this kind but need support in specialised areas and a guarantee that someone else will subsequently be prepared to pick up the burden.

For NATO, the decision is undoubtedly a watershed, as important as its first involvement in the Balkans. Only months after Prague we are putting into effect the new NATO blueprint. And doing so at a time when the received wisdom is that transatlantic differences on Iraq make consensus on other issues impossible.

Indeed, it is now quite natural for NATO Foreign Ministers to look beyond Afghanistan to a possible role for the Alliance in post-conflict Iraq, as also happened last month. We are not yet at the stage of taking decisions, but it is a sign of the strength of the transatlantic link that no Ally is ruling out a role in the right circumstances.

Ladies and Gentlemen,

For those of you who have heard NATO speeches in the past, this one might have come as a bit of a surprise. This is not your grandfather’s Alliance. Or even your mother’s. This is the NATO for your grandchildren.

The 21st century NATO – with new members, new missions, and new capabilities. It is an Alliance that squares the circle of being truly multilateral, and truly effective. It engages the United States, Europe and Canada in common causes, defending common values and interests, in an organisation where each country has an equal voice, and where each can and must make a real contribution.

Most importantly, NATO provides security – defending its members, and keeping the peace on behalf of the international community.

It has taken up the challenge of relevance and transformed itself. It is demonstrably effective. And it delivers.

Thank you.
Merci beaucoup.

  1. Turkey recognises the Republic of Macedonia with its constitutional name .

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