u.s. policy & issues
Ambassador Cloud Addresses Vilnius University
Institute for International Relations and Political Science
December 5, 2006
Thank you. It's great to be here at the Institute, particularly given my own academic background is in the same subjects you are studying. I expect that no educational institution has, and will have, a greater impact on Lithuania's foreign and public policy making than this one, and it is an honor to speak here.
Lithuania is a strong ally of the United States. We share common values of democracy and freedom. We have a common strategic interest in promoting these values.
Nowhere are our common interests and values more evident than in our membership in the NATO alliance. As you know, President Bush was in Riga last week to attend the NATO summit. The President reaffirmed the United States' commitment to NATO. In his speech, President Bush highlighted our commitment to collective security and to NATO's shared values of democracy and freedom. The recent change in the balance of power in the U.S. Congress has not weakened our relationship with NATO, our support for NATO's missions, or our intention to work with our European partners, including Lithuania, to provide for our collective security.
NATO's decision to hold the summit in Riga underscores one of NATO’s successes following the end of the Cold War: the achievement of bringing former Warsaw Pact states -- former parts of the Soviet Union, even -- into NATO and the family of European democracies. There have of course been military successes too: for example, the intervention in the Balkans that helped end the killing there.
The commentators who said that NATO would have no purpose at the end of the Cold War were wrong. The alliance has grown bigger and busier. The demands on NATO to address common threats today show us that had NATO been dissolved when the Warsaw Pact collapsed, it probably would have to been reinvented.
The threats to NATO in the intervening years have changed, of course, so NATO itself is changing. I believe NATO’s transformation since 1989 – including the creation of the Partnership for Peace, the admission of new members, the partnerships with non-members, the movement out-of-area, military transformation, among others – is underappreciated.
One of the major outcomes from Riga was the “Comprehensive Political Guidance,” which is a document in which our leaders answer the question, what is NATO for?
During the Cold War, NATO's purpose was to defend our societies and common values by defending our borders from invasion. NATO's mission now is to advance our common values and create stability. The political guidance recognizes that instability outside the Euro Atlantic space poses a threat to Alliance members. "The [Security] environment continues to change; it is and will be complex and global, and subject to unforeseeable developments," the document says. "International security developments have an increasing impact on the lives of the citizens of Allied and other countries...Peace, Security and Development are more interconnected than ever."
In Riga, our leaders named terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction as the likely principal threats to the alliance over the next 15 years. They also talked about the instability that follows failed or failing states, regional conflicts, the growing availability of conventional weapons and disruption in the flow of resources, especially in the energy sector.
NATO no longer has one perceived threat to its common security, but many different threats. And because these threats, like terrorism, exist on a global scale, so must NATO. NATO must be able to carry out all military tasks, from peacekeeping to full-scale war, and it must be able to respond to threats from wherever they may come. As threats to our common security have changed, NATO must transform itself to answer them.
The transformation that our leaders laid out at Riga has of course already been going on. For most of its history, NATO never fired a shot. Now NATO is fighting.
Consider our path since the end of the Cold War: In 1994, NATO was an alliance of 16 states, without partners, having never conducted a military operation. By 2005, NATO had become an alliance of 26, engaged in eight simultaneous operations on four continents with the help of 20 Partners in Eurasia, seven in the Mediterranean, and four in the Persian Gulf. Besides the NATO deployments in Afghanistan and Kosovo, NATO flies air patrols over the Baltic States and Slovenia, carries out anti-terrorist naval patrols in the Mediterranean, runs military headquarters in Bosnia and Macedonia, trains the Iraqi army and gives logistical support to African peacekeepers in Darfur.
Our disparate missions in Afghanistan, in Kosovo, in Iraq, have a common purpose: the promotion of peace and security, the protection of freedom. But they are different kinds of missions in different geographical theaters. They show that there is demand for NATO to address different sorts of common threats.
At Riga, our leaders highlighted several important steps in NATO transformation.
One: We expanded the strategic dialogue with our allies. We don't just want to talk about where NATO is deployed, but we want to talk about all of the challenges to our collective security. We need to use the NATO table to strengthen our political approach and to talk about the tools that we can use to address today's challenges.
Two: We moved to strengthen our relationship with partners. NATO has for more than a decade had good relations in the euro-Atlantic space. Increasingly, today's challenges require that we work well with nations all around the world, particularly countries who share our values and are willing to commit to working with us.
Three: We reaffirmed NATO's open door policy. At a time when many Europeans are questioning the limits of Europe, the United States, Lithuania, and our NATO allies see the possibility of expansion as essential to NATO's goal to create a Europe whole, free, and at peace. From America's perspective, NATO's role as a mentor and magnet for change and positive democratic reform throughout the transatlantic space has been one of its greatest exports. We must keep the door open, and continue to work with those countries who aspire to meet NATO's performance-based standards for membership.
There were obviously a lot of military initiatives at the summit. There were initiatives about strategic airlift, Special Forces, information and so on. All of those are important. But it is when you step back that you can see something much more important. NATO is becoming something different than the static Cold War organization which we all relied on for so many years.
The greatest test of NATO's ability to protect our collective security in the 21st century is Afghanistan, where NATO has taken on the lead role. This is not NATO's first military operation. It fought in Kosovo in 1999, but that was primarily an air war. In Afghanistan, NATO is engaged for the first time in active ground combat. Our shared goal is to prevent Afghanistan from reverting to a failed state and terrorist haven. NATO troops are in each sector of the country, including Eastern and Southern Afghanistan.
Our experience in Afghanistan shows us that NATO's transformation -- which our leaders discussed in principle at Riga -- is already a reality on the ground.
Today 37 countries are contributing to the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Twenty-six are NATO allies. Eleven are partners from outside NATO, like Australia, South Korea, Japan, and Jordan. Together, all are bringing stability to nearly 30 million people in Afghanistan. Fifteen years ago, who would have thought that all NATO members and partners would have made this long-term commitment to rebuilding a country far from Europe? That countries like Australia, New Zealand, Albania, Croatia, or Macedonia would contribute to this NATO mission? Our leaders in Riga pointed out the need for partnership and the need for out-of-area operations. They are really catching the principles up to what already exists in practice. In Afghanistan, global partnership is a reality. "Out- of-area" operations are the NATO norm today.
We are learning other lessons from Afghanistan too. At Riga, our leaders emphasized the importance of military and civilian planners working together to rebuild war-torn areas. This is something that the Lithuanian military already knows all about.
Lithuania recognized in Ghor Province, where you are leading a Provincial Reconstruction Team, that there is no security without development, and there can be no development without security. The military component in Afghanistan is the necessary base for Lithuanians and other assistance providers to reconstruct schools, to bring power to small villages, to create a professional and competent police force. There is still a lot to be done, as journalists and professors here have pointed out. But no one working in Afghanistan in the field doubts that Lithuania's presence there is helping to build a successful future for the Afghan people.
Afghanistan has also highlighted some of NATO's capacity shortfalls. At Riga, fourteen Allies and Sweden agreed to buy C-17 aircraft together, because all of us have realized that if you want to get to Afghanistan, if you want to sustain your troops, you need strategic lift. Today, we are buying lift because we need it for Afghanistan. But if we have lift for Afghanistan, we will also have it for the NATO, EU, and UN missions of the future; for national needs, and for coalition operations.
The need to respond to a common threat in Afghanistan has shown us what your Alliance can do today. It can provide a platform for Allies to work together to meet common needs, and in the process, strengthen all of us.
Similarly, we have talked for a long time about Special Forces and the particular role that they play in 21st century operations. Today at NATO, we’re working on a Special Forces initiative. It would have been impossible five years ago, but because of the reality of working in Afghanistan, because so many of our Special Forces are working together there, we have proven the point that we need to be able to do it more seamlessly. We need to train together. We need to be able to communicate with each other. We need common operating procedures.
So today, again, Afghanistan has ensured that we are already doing in reality what our leaders endorsed in principle in Riga.
But there’s also some bad news that Afghanistan has exposed and highlighted. Number one here is the fact that all of us, all 26 Allies, are stretched when you look at our security forces. There is not a single ally who is not working hard to maintain operational tempo out there in the world, my own country included.
What does this mean? What it means is that collectively we are not spending enough on defense and security and we’re going to have to spend more if we’re going to meet the security commitments that we have made to each other and made around the world, not just as allies, but as members of the international community.
Whether you’re talking about meeting our NATO commitments in Afghanistan or Kosovo, or about EU members meeting EU commitments in Congo and Bosnia, or commitments like Iraq for those of us who are there, or meeting UN commitments in Lebanon, most Allies are stretched by all that we have to do in the world. When you look at defense spending, if you take the United States out of the equation, the rest of the Allies combined spend on average only 1.8 percent of GDP on defense. Lithuania, for all it is doing around the world for the alliance, spends only 1.27 percent of GDP on defense. Only seven Allies today are meeting NATO’s unofficial floor of spending two percent of GDP on defense spending.
Why? One reason is that many of us took a peace dividend at the end of the Cold War. There were good reasons for that. But today as we look around the world, and we look at all we are trying to do together as Allies and Partners who share values, who share a commitment to common security, and who understand that if we don’t confront threats out there they're going to come here, we need to increase our investment.
We also need to ensure that we maintain our commitment and our solidarity to each other. That means in Afghanistan and elsewhere ensuring that when we agree to deploy troops, they are as flexible and open as possible so that we can help each other when we need to.
I would argue that NATO today is delivering 21st century security. We’re doing it in Afghanistan, we’re doing it in Kosovo, and we’re doing it with our training mission in Iraq, and with our support for the African Union in Darfur. We are doing it because it’s in our own collective interest to strengthen those parts of the world and ensure that threats to our security at home aren't allowed to form elsewhere, as they did in Afghanistan. But this is hard, expensive work which requires a long-term, sustained commitment and resources.
Some people view NATO's push for resources as competition with EU defense policy. This shouldn't be the case. A strong NATO doesn't mean a weak European Union. A weak European Union does nothing for us. A strong European Union is a good partner.
On the ground, the EU and NATO have cooperated well. NATO has handed over its stabilization missions in Bosnia and Macedonia to the EU. With 19 members in common, NATO and the EU necessarily share many resources: soldiers, equipment, military planners. Developing Europe’s defense resources in the context of European Security and Defense policy can and should be good for the NATO alliance as well. The ability to deploy, work together, and respond to different challenges should be the same whether in EU Battle Groups or in the NATO Response Force. We will have to see how this works in practice as both programs develop. It depends a lot on the EU and NATO working well together, but the United States hopes and expects they will.
Over the past few years, the United States has done all we can to strengthen our relations with European governments. We are partners with the major European Governments on the issue of Iran in the Security Council. We are partners with them on North Korea.
Our agenda with Europe is now a global agenda. It's about working together to make progress with our partners in the Middle East, South and East Asia, in Africa and Latin America. It's difficult for me to imagine any global problem being solved without the close collaboration of Europe and the United States.
We look at NATO as the locus of strategic consultation in the transatlantic community. Over the last year at NATO headquarters, we've talked about Iran at the Foreign Minister Level; we've talked about energy security with experts; we've had Africa experts in to talk about the broader challenges we face there. We've recently released statements on the North Korean nuclear threat. So the dialogue at NATO is getting broader.
To sum up, the threats to NATO have changed, and NATO is changing with them. The alliance is in many ways becoming a different organization, with new members and capacities. It is working with new partners in new areas of the world. One might ask, why transform NATO if the end result is a completely different organization? The answer is that NATO is more than just a strategic military alliance. It is an alliance based on shared values. And these values remain the same.
During the Cold War, when the transatlantic community faced a common threat, NATO bound us together. By guaranteeing our shared security and defending our values –- freedom, democracy, human rights, the rule of law, and free markets –- NATO helped create the conditions for democracy and prosperity in the Europe we know today. This is the prosperity that today forms the basis of our $2.5 trillion economic and trade relationships. As the Iron Curtain fell, the feared "security vacuum" in Central Europe never appeared because NATO – and the EU – led the way in anchoring new democracies in the transatlantic community. At that time, the Alliance set out with a bold goal: to create a Europe whole, free, and at peace.
For NATO to succeed in this goal, it needs the continued support of its members. We need to maintain political commitment to the principle of open doors. We need to maintain the commitment to invest in expanding our capacities to address threats wherever they arise. We need to reinforce our commitments to our core common values of democracy and freedom, the growth of which will form the basis of our future security.
By ending the Cold War, NATO brought freedom and security to millions of Europeans. I would like to reiterate what President Bush said in Riga: "As we help the new democracies of Europe join the Institutions of Europe, we must not forget those who still languish in tyranny."
Last week in Riga, President Bush said, "Each of the Baltic countries is meeting its obligations to strengthen NATO by bringing new energy and vitality and clarity of purpose to the alliance. Your love of liberty has made NATO stronger -- and with your help, our Alliance is rising to meet the great challenges and responsibilities of this young century, by making NATO the world's most effective united force for freedom."
Thank you.
