NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg began a two-day visit to New Zealand with stops in Christchurch and Wellington.

Transcript

Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Dr. Capie, for the warm welcome and it is really a great pleasure to be here this evening and to see all of you. And it’s great to be back in New Zealand because I’m from Norway and I feel very much at home in New Zealand for different reasons, partly because we are two relatively small nations, around five million inhabitants, partly because we are two very beautiful nations, with the mountains and the fjords, and also because we have some great explorers. The last time I was here in 2011, I was here on my way to the South Pole, to celebrate the first man to set foot on the South Pole, and that was a Norwegian of course, Roald Amundsen. But then I also learned that the first man to be at the top of the Mount Everest was Sir Hillary. So, it’s always great to be back in New Zealand. Then, we have more in common than just the beautiful nature and the great explorers, we have also in common that we are faced with and we have to address the same security challenges, and that’s the fact despite the fact that we are far apart, the NATO Alliance, the North Atlantic Alliance in the North Atlantic, and then New Zealand here in the South. We are far apart but we are facing the same challenges and I will be very brief, so we have time for questions and interaction afterwards, but I will reflect on that main message that, despite that you are not a NATO member, that you’re not the North Atlantic Council, you are actually faced with the same security challenges, or many of the same security challenges, because more and more of the security challenges we all are faced with are global, are becoming less and less regional and more and more global. And let me therefore dwell with three main challenges both New Zealand and NATO, NATO Allies, are facing. The first is increased competition between great powers, great power competition. And we see the consequences of that from Crimea, the illegal annexation of Crimea, to North Korea, from Syria to the South China Sea. We have seen a significant build up of the Russian military capabilities, we see a more assertive Russia and just a few days ago we saw an example how this increased great power competition is undermining the rules based order, the respect for international treaties and obligations, when Russia or when the INF Treaty, the Treaty of Intermediate Range Nuclear Weapons ceased to exist on the 2nd of August. And for those who are not so very familiar with the INF Treaty, this has been a cornerstone for arms control for decades, since 1987. It has not only reduced the number of nuclear weapons, but it has banned, eliminated all intermediate range weapons, nuclear and conventional, land based. And it has been of great importance for arms control and especially in Europe. This treaty ceased to exist on Friday, last Friday, because Russia has violated the treaty now for several years. They have deployed new missiles, something called SSC-8, which are intermediate range missiles, able to reach European cities within minutes. They are mobile, hard to detect and the fact that the warning time was so little, reduces the threshold for any potential use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict. So, the increased great power competition, a more assertive Russia, is putting the rules-based order under pressure, and the latest example is the demise of the INF Treaty. But we have seen other examples, for instance the illegal annexation of Crimea, the first time in Europe that one country has taken a part of another country since the end of the Second World War. And we have seen an increased Russian presence in the Middle East, in Syria, and also Russia trying to meddle in and undermining the trust in democratic institutions in several NATO Allied countries and also elsewhere. We also see the rise of China. China’s role and influence is another sign of increasing global power competition. Its economic rise is powering global growth and it’s quickly becoming a technological leader in many fields. This brings many opportunities, financially and politically, and while China presents a very different set of challenge than Russia, its rise also has implications for the global rules-based order and for our security. We see this in the South China Sea, in cyberspace, and in Chinese investments in critical infrastructure in many countries, including in Europe. So therefore, we need to better understand the challenges and the opportunities the rise of China presents. So, these are two different global powers, China and Russia, they represent challenges for all of us, both NATO Allies and New Zealand, and many other countries. And we see that the rules-based order, which New Zealand has championed and supported so strongly for so many years, is now under pressure because of increased competition and violation of many of the rules we have developed together over the decades. So, that’s one of the challenges we have in common, despite the fact that New Zealand is not part of or a member of NATO. Another is terrorism. Terrorism knows no borders. Terrorism is something which is a threat to every country. We don’t see any imminent risk of any military, conventional military attack on any NATO Allied country, but we see a constant threat of potential terrorist attacks. We have seen it in many European countries, we have seen it in United States, 9/11, but we have also seen it in New Zealand. So, no country can 100% guarantee or be 100% secure against terrorist attacks and terrorist threats. NATO plays a role in the fight against terrorism. We have to remember that the reason why NATO is in Afghanistan, we have been there for many, many years, is to make sure that Afghanistan doesn’t once again become a safe haven for international terrorists, where they can organize, plan, finance, prepare terrorist attacks on our countries, as they did against the United States, organized and planned from Afghanistan in 2001, 9/11. New Zealand has been together with us in Afghanistan, as one of our closest partners. New Zealand is still contributing troops and forces to our training mission in Afghanistan and we are extremely grateful for that. New Zealand is also part of the Global Coalition to Defeat Daesh, ISIS in Iraq and Syria, and elsewhere. And the fight against Daesh is not over, but we have made significant progress and I’m grateful and I thank New Zealand for being part of the efforts that made this progress possible. Then, I think that you know better than anyone else that terrorism comes in many forms and wears many different guises. You saw that in Christchurch in March, I saw that as Prime Minister in Norway on 22nd July 2011, where right wing extremists attacked innocent people, in Christchurch, in Oslo, at a summer camp just outside Oslo, and that reminds us that terrorism is not about religion, it’s about hatred, it’s about extremism, it’s about people that believe that they have the right to use violence against others. And therefore, we need to condemn and fight terrorism, extremism, regardless of what kind of guise, what kind of form it comes in. It is something that threatens our fundamental values, regardless of what kind of ideology or religion the terrorists try to misuse. The last common challenge I will mention is cyber, because cyber is truly global and we see that there is no, new and emerging technologies and cyber, so, new and emerging technologies, as artificial intelligence or quantum computing or autonomous weapons, combined with cyber, which has been here for some time already, is now changing the nature of conflict as fundamentally as the industrial revolution changed the nature of conflict before the First World War. And therefore NATO, New Zealand, all of us, have to fully understand and react based on the fundamental changes we now see when it comes to technology and how technology applies when it comes to conflict between nations, and also the potential use of cyber by terrorists and non government organizations. And for NATO, this is so important that we have of course realized that a cyberattack can be as damaging as a conventional attack. It can cause as much damage, as much suffering, as conventional attacks. One of the big problems with cyberattacks is attribution, who is behind, and therefore intelligence, better systems to protect our cyber networks, more exercises, and we also can work together with New Zealand, better technology, shared best practices, everything we can do to protect our networks and also protect our institutions, is part of what NATO is now working more and more on because we understand that, in any potential conflict in the future, there will be a very big and important cyber dimension. So, I promised to be brief, therefore I will just end by saying that my message to you today is that we are living in a world which is more unpredictable, where security challenges are more and more integrated, where it’s harder to speak about regional challenges, they are becoming more and more global, so we are all affected in one way or another. And in uncertain and unpredictable times, with global challenges, we need to build multilateral institutions, strong international cooperation, like the UN, like the European Union, like NATO, but of course also the cooperation a regional organization as NATO has with partners as New Zealand. So, to build cooperation, to build institutions, is the best way to deal with all the uncertainty and all the unpredictability we are faced with in today’s international climate. So with that, I thank you for your attention and I’m ready to take your questions. Thank you.