NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg welcomed unprecedented levels of cooperation between the EU and NATO ahead of a meeting with the EU Foreign Affairs Council on Tuesday last week.
The Secretary General noted that stronger European defence can contribute to fairer burden-sharing within NATO, but stressed the need for complementarity between NATO and EU efforts.
“NATO remains the bedrock for European security,” he said. Mr. Stoltenberg added that he will also discuss the INF Treaty with EU ministers. “We should all call on Russia to ensure full and transparent compliance with the INF Treaty because we don’t want a new arms race and the INF Treaty has been important for our security for decades,” he underlined.
“When I meet the EU Defence Ministers now, I expect us also to discuss the issue of European defence. I have welcomed EU efforts on defence many times, because I believe that projects such as military mobility, European Defence Fund, PESCO, all of that can contribute to fairer burden-sharing within NATO. It can complement NATO and it can also help to develop new NATO capabilities and also address the fragmentation of the European defence market.
So this is something I have welcomed many many times. But I have been equally clear about the fact that EU efforts must not compete with NATO, must not duplicate NATO, because NATO remains the bedrock for European security. We have to remember that after Brexit 80% of NATO’s defence expenditure will come from non-EU NATO Allies. And 3 of the four battlegroups we have deployed in the eastern part of the Alliance, in the Baltics countries and Poland will be led by non-EU Allies. And also geography matters.
Norway in the North, and Turkey in the South, and Canada, USA and UK in the West are important for European security. So geography and money, these are facts which we cannot ignore.”
If this encourages European countries to raise defense spending (by EU funding) all well and good. I have a feeling it will just be used by France and Germany to channel European defense spending to subsidise their own defense industry to the exclusion of the US and UK with very little done to actually improve their overall defensive capabilities.
We already know that Macron wants a European Army that can stand up to Russia, China and bizarrely our NATO ally, the USA…! Thank god we’ve dodged that one ?
Not yet, still time for the country to mess it up and be under the control of Aunty Merkel!
Lets hope we see sense & join the Euro Army, we got sod all left to fight with on our own & i wouldnt trust the Trumpster ..
Except for the best trained and one of the most capable militaries in the world you fucking retard?
Jens Stoltenberg is a very commendable european, partly due to not belonging to a country wIthin the EU, of course; to the extent that ‘western defence = USA’