NATO Deputy Secretary General Rose Gottemoeller speaks at the opening session of the 2017 NATO Transformation Seminar in Budapest, Hungary.
TRANSCRIPT:
Good morning everyone. It’s indeed a beautiful day here in Budapest and I’ve already thanked the Minister for providing us such a lovely weather over these past days and I understand it will continue till tomorrow but truly it’s an honor, Minister, to share the podium with you. Thank you for the hosting of this meeting and thank you to all your colleagues from your ministry and across the Hungarian government who have helped put this meeting together.
I also want to thank General Mercier for putting it together and being the intellectual power house behind these annual Transformation Seminars, they are so important I think to driving NATO forward in a way that really helps to ensure that we are a vital institution, constantly on the cusp of adaptation.
It’s appropriate that this year’s NTS is taking place in Hungary – a country that has produced many transformational inventors, innovators and outside-the-box thinkers from its very founding. Over the years, inventors and engineers of Hungarian origin have given us, among many other things: the helicopter, the Model T Ford, the assembly line, I thought Henry Ford invented those but it was apparently a Hungarian, so…. holography, color TV, and last but not least Rubik’s Cube – which has frustrated and fascinated millions of people around the world over the years.
That same spirit of innovation and transformation lies at the core of ACT’s mission, and is reflected in the theme of this seminar – “Improving Today, Shaping Tomorrow, Keeping the Edge by Bridging the Two.”
Keeping our edge sometimes requires going out on a conceptual ledge, so to speak, it means considering novel ideas and thinking in new ways. I salute the entire team from ACT for your ongoing determination to push the envelope in the direction of change and also continuous adaptation.
As General Mercier will discuss with you today, ACT is focused on adaptation, exploring innovative ideas, outside-the-box concepts, potential new technologies and strategic approaches. That’s exactly what this NATO Transformation Seminar is all about. This is the time for barrier-free brainstorming and unfettered creative thinking. That is why I so truly welcome the role of the International Institute for Strategic Studies in this endeavor. The IISS is a place where I am also an alumna, I served there as a research associate in the mid- 1980s and as deputy director of the institute in the mid-1990s, so I’m actually delighted to see the way in which the institute is returning to its roots in the transatlantic relationship.
I was very impressed by the paper the IISS has produced about a Persistent Federated Approach for us to consider and discuss over the next two days. As I understand it’s about turning NATO into Uber, or Uber into NATO and I think it’s up to us over the next two days to decide which is which so that’s a very worthy challenge I would say. But joking aside the paper is about enabling NATO members to connect more closely, more flexibly and on a more persistent basis, a topic well worth discussing in the coming two days. I want to thank IISS for this contribution, as well as for helping to organize this seminar and for providing us with a number of moderators and speakers.
I want to underscore another thing that’s important about ACT. It is headquartered in Virginia and in that case ACT is NATO’s home in North America. So in addition to everything else, ACT serves as a vivid symbol of NATO’s enduring transatlantic bond. Since our founding in 1949, NATO has adapted time and again to changing security environments. During the Cold War NATO focused on collective defence and deterrence, after 1989 we adapted to the changed circumstances by including crisis management beyond our borders. The mantra then was: out of area or out of business. In the 1990s NATO indeed went out of area and helped to stop large-scale bloodshed in the Western Balkans. We adapted in other ways too, before 1990 NATO had zero partners, now we cooperate with a network of 41 partners in Central Europe, Eastern Europe, Central Asia and beyond. Many of those partners are represented at our meeting here today and I truly welcome their presence and look forward to them enriching and contributing to our discourse.
As a result of working with our partners, today NATO is smarter, more agile and more effective as an Alliance. Our evolution included the addition of 12 new NATO members between 1999 and 2009 beginning with Hungary, the Czech Republic and Poland. This infusion of new members and new perspectives has spurred organisational change and new thinking. In response to 9/11 we invoked our collective defence clause, Article 5, for the first time. And we adapted even more, we deployed our largest combat mission to ensure that Afghanistan would never again become a home and a platform for international terrorists. And after the watershed events of 2014, with Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine and the rise of ISIL, it became clear that NATO that must engage in both enhancing Collective Defence and projecting greater stability beyond our borders. And we must do both at the same time. In the past two years, following decisions made at our Wales and Warsaw Summits NATO has implemented the biggest reinforcement of our collective defence capability since the end of the Cold War. And we are sharpening our focus on additional steps we can take both to project stability and to fight terrorism.
I’m Chairman of a new group at NATO, the Projecting Stability Board, and I wanted to say just a few words about what we are trying to accomplish with this group. We all knew that when our neighbours are more stable, we are more secure. NATO projects stability in various ways, through our partnerships, through our training and capacity work and through our crisis management. Projecting Stability is a broad and cross-cutting effort. To do this most effectively, we need to do it as one NATO. To that end, Foreign Ministers endorsed a report in December 2016 that set forth a number of objectives and taskings. And the Secretary General appointed me to lead the new Projecting Stability Board which draws together all civilian and military divisions and the strategic commands at NATO. Last week the Board began our work, concentrating on 3 merit main areas: first, to bring coherence, prioritisation and clear objectives to current efforts related to projecting stability. This will include taking an in-depth look at neighbouring countries that we consider to be our priorities, and working to harmonise all of our stability building efforts for those countries.
Second, to make better-informed research decisions which may require institutional adaptations to ensure that we coordinate work across all of our divisions at NATO. And third, most importantly, to generate new policy proposals. If we find that we need to change our approach we should do so, that is the essence of NATO’s adaptability. Next week, I will present the early results of the work of the Projecting Stability policy Board and set forth a detailed plan for the board’s work in the months to come. Projecting stability is an extremely complicated undertaking, it requires close cooperation with many different partners over an extended period of time. There are no quick fixes, projecting stability and increasing our role to fight terrorism are central to NATO’s agenda and will be for years to come. All of our efforts to adapt to changing security challenges will require a combination of determination, unity of purpose, innovative thinking and increased defence spending. But on this point, I want to really emphasise a favourite point that Secretary General Stoltenberg makes: we not only need to spend more, we need to spend better as well, and that is an important I think, contribution that both ACT makes, helping us to think about spending better, but I challenge you to help us on that important road in our meetings over the next two days.
NATO faces serious challenges to our security and to the stability of our neighbours, our Alliance remains strong and united as we continue to adapt. So I encourage all of us to explore bold new ideas and challenge old assumptions. What happens at this seminar over these two days will not stay in Budapest. Our deliberations here will influence our decisions at the upcoming meeting of the Heads of State and Government in Brussels and at our Summit in 2018. And perhaps you heard yesterday, the Secretary General did confirm the meeting of Heads of State and Government in Brussels on 25 May so we are looking forward to that and indeed, your deliberations and the outcome of this meeting will flow quite nicely into the discussions there. I am confident that this year’s seminar will inform NATO’s policies today, help us to creatively shape tomorrow and keep our edge for many years to come. NATO has been so successful for almost 70 years because we have continuously adapted and today as we face the biggest challenges in a generation, we must continue to drive that adaptation for generations to come. Thank you very much for your attention and I look forward to our discussions.
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