Speech by NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg at the Massey College, University of Toronto

Transcript

Good evening, dear friends. First of all, let me thank the Canadian NATO Association and the NATO Defense College and also the Massey College for hosting us all here today. It is really a great honor for me to be here and to meet you all and to be able to have a discussion with you because what I’m going to do now is only to give you some brief introductory remarks so we can start a discussion, have some interaction, and then address the main challenges NATO is facing as we celebrate our 70th anniversary this year, but first of all, I would like to say that I am very pleased to be in Toronto in Canada. I always feel very much at home in Canada for different reasons. One reason is actually that my mother lived in Canada for many years and studied here, so I was raised on a kind of diet of pancakes and maple syrup and gender equality, (audience laughing) and, yeah, I think that she learned a lot of that in Canada. Second, I feel at home in Canada because I’m a Norwegian, and as you all know it was a Norseman who was the first European to set foot, (audience laughing) so why you laugh? That’s a very serious historical fact, which few people are aware of. Actually, 500 years before Christopher Columbus, and we still discuss with Iceland whether he was Norwegian or Icelandic, but he was from somewhere over there, and then, I also feel at home in Canada for the fact that, the reason, the fact that I’m living in Brussels, and in Brussels I’m very close to some of the battlefields where Canadians have fought and paid a very high price. Flanders Fields is just one hour from where I live now, and Flanders Fields is a famous battlefield for many reasons, but not least for a poem written by a Canadian officer during the First World War, and not so far from where I live, or three hours with a car, three or four hours with a car, is Normandy beaches, and there also Canadian soldiers fought during the Second World War, and then I feel at home in Canada because Canada is a founding member of NATO, and the main purpose of NATO was to make sure that what we saw during the First and the Second World War should never happen again, and one of the architects, one of the politicians that were instrumental in creating NATO back in 1949 was Lester Pearson, at that time the Canadian Foreign Minister. So Canada has been a key, highly valued ally, since the foundation of this Alliance, and then, since the Alliance was founded 70 years ago, NATO has been the most successful alliance in history, and there are many reasons for that, but there are two main reasons why NATO has been, and still is, the strongest and most successful alliance that mankind have ever seen. The two reasons are our unity and our ability to adapt, to change when the world is changing, and therefore I would just briefly reflect on those two reasons why we have succeeded. First, our unity, we are an Alliance of 29 different nations, 29 democracies from both sides of the Atlantic with different political culture, different political parties in government, different views on many issues, but despite all these differences, we have always been able to unite around our core task, and that is one for all and all for one, to protect each other, and by doing that we have been able to preserve the peace, and we have to remember that the main task, the main purpose of NATO, is to prevent war. We do that by standing together and sending a clear message to any potential adversary or aggressor that if one ally is attacked, it will trigger a response from the whole Alliance. One for all, all for one, and by doing that in 70 years, over a period of 70 years, we have been able to prevent any NATO ally from being attacked, and if you look at the history of Europe, that is unprecedented. It is not possible to find a longer period in European history where you have no major conflict between the countries which are now members of the NATO Alliance, and no of them have been attacked. Then I admit that we now see that there are differences between NATO allies, and there are some serious disagreements between NATO allies on issues such as trade, climate change, the Iran nuclear deal, and other issues, and these are serious disagreements about serious issues, but the paradox is that, despite all these disagreements and differences, we see that actually as NATO, NATO allies are doing more together now than we have done for many, many years, so what we see is that, yes, questions are being asked on both sides of the Atlantic about the strength of our unity, but when you look at the actions, what we actually do together, we actually do more together than we have done for many years. North America, U.S. and Canada, you are not reducing your presence in Europe. You’re actually increasing your presence in Europe, with more troops, more investments than we have seen for many, many years, and that’s the case both for Canada and for North America, not withdrawing forces from Europe but actually adding forces to the NATO presence in Europe, and European allies are also stepping up, investing more and stepping up in different NATO missions and operations. So the paradox is that we see people questioning the unity, the strength of the transatlantic bond, but when you look at the facts on the ground, that bond is stronger and filled with more content now than it has been for many, many years, so the first reason for our success is our unity, and as long as we are able to maintain that unity, we maintain the main reason for the strength of our Alliance. The other reason for our success is our ability to adapt to change when the world is changing, and then we have to remember that for 40 years NATO did actually only one thing, and that was to deter the Soviet Union in Europe, and we were able to end the Cold War without a shot being fired. Then, after the Cold War, NATO went into a very different task, so we started to do very different things. We started to project stability beyond NATO territory, beyond our borders. First we helped to end ethnic wars, or wars in the Balkans, in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Serbia Kosovo, and also, actually, in North Macedonia. Then we helped to spread peace and democracy throughout Europe by enlargement of NATO with former members of the Warsaw Pact, Central and Eastern European countries, and then we also played, and we are still playing, a key role in fighting terrorism, especially after the 9/11 attacks, where we actually have to remember that the first and only time we have invoked our Article Five clause, the collective defense clause, was not to protect a small ally, but it was actually to protect our biggest ally, the United States, and hundreds of thousands of soldiers from Europe, from Canada, partner nations, have served shoulder to shoulder with U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan since then, so what we saw was an ability for NATO to change after the end of the Cold War, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, to change totally from deterring the Soviet Union to engaging, projecting stability beyond our borders, fighting terrorism, spreading democracy in Europe through enlargement, and helping to end wars in the Balkans, so NATO changed because the world changed. Now we are changing again because after the illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014, after the rise of Daesh, we saw Daesh in Iraq, Syria, in 2014, we realized that we need to step up our efforts, both when it comes to fighting terrorism, projecting stability beyond our borders, managing crises beyond our borders, but also when it comes to collective defense, deterrence, our core task in Europe, and the good news is that that’s exactly what we have done. We have implemented the biggest reinforcement to our collective defense since the end of the Cold War, and Canada is very much part of that. Canada is now leading a battle group in Latvia. I met some of the soldiers there earlier today, and Canada is leading some of our maritime operations. Canada is contributing planes to our air policing, and Canada is really stepping up, also investing more in defense. After years of cutting defense budgets, Canada is now investing more, as all other NATO allies are doing, investing more in defense, so after years of reducing, building down collective defense, we are now investing more and building up because we live in a more unpredictable and more challenging security environment, and we know that when the world is more uncertain, when we are faced with more threats and challenges, then we need strong international institutions. We need multilateral institutions. NATO is one of those, which is extremely important to strengthen as response to the increase in uncertainty we are faced with. We are also stepping up our fight against terrorism, mainly by training local forces, because we strongly believe that training local forces is one of the best weapons we have in the fight against terrorism, and, again, Canada is playing a key role by leading our training mission in Iraq. So my message today is that NATO is the most successful alliance in history because we have been able to unite, despite the differences, and what we see today is that we continue to unite around our core task, to defend and protect each other despite differences, and as long as we continue to do that at the same time as we are able to change and adapt, then we will continue to be the strongest and most successful alliance also in the future, and Canada is an important part of that adaptation and that unity. That was my introduction. Thank you so much for having me, and then I’m ready to answer your questions. Thank you.