NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters Monday that the new deployment will realize a plan laid out by the alliance two years ago at its last summit for the “biggest reinforcement of NATO’s collective defense since the Cold War”.
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White House aides say the war in Afghanistan, backed by a coalition of 41 partner countries, embodies Obama’s multilateral approach to global conflicts.
German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Thursday defended the planned North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) presence in eastern Europe in her official statement on the forthcoming NATO summit in Warsaw. “But we can see that same order increasingly strained by the accelerating forces of change”.
Germany will lead a battalion deployed to Lithuania, Canada to Latvia, Britain to Estonia and the United States to Poland, diplomats told AFP on condition of anonymity.
At the top of the agenda is the fraught relationship with Russian Federation, which has been especially roiled since the invasion of Georgia in 2008, followed by the failed “reset” with Moscow, the invasion of Ukraine and the annexation of Crimea.
“NATO is based on the core idea of one for all, and all for one”, said Stoltenberg.
He said that the recent attacks carried out in France, Belgium, Tunisia, and the US show that no matter how developed a country is, it can not avoid the issue.
The NATO-Russia Council is scheduled to meet in Brussels next week following this weekend’s NATO summit in Warsaw.
Russian officials vowed to take unspecified countermeasures.
“The Soviet Union is no more; the Warsaw Pact has ceased to exist”, Russian President Vladimir Putin said recently, referring to the now-defunct military alliance between Moscow and its Eastern European satellites that was also formalized in Poland’s capital. Thus, NATO’s steps provoked risks and challenges to Russia’s security interests even before the current crisis in Russia-NATO relations.
The Islamic State group carried out an attack on a Turkish airport in Istanbul on June 28, which according to the state-run Anadolu news agency left in its wake 44 dead and more than 200 injured.
“The world is a more unsafe place than just a few years ago”, Stoltenberg said.
Alliance AWACS surveillance aircraft will likely be ordered to peer into Islamic State-controlled areas of Syria and Iraq to assist the USA -led coalition combating the group, probably beginning this fall.
USA officials have downplayed the security risks that Britain’s decision to exit the European Union could cause.
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The summit is taking place in one of NATO’s newest members, Poland, which shares a long border with Russian Federation and has expressed concern about its neighbor’s predatory actions in Ukraine.
