NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, on Monday 15 March, advocated for a stronger partnership between the EU and the Atlantic Alliance, calling on MEPs to support this rapprochement.
“You can help push to more ambitious and practical cooperation between the EU and NATO”, he said at a hearing with MEPs from the European Parliament’s Committee on Foreign Affairs and from the Subcommittee on Security and Defence. “We can and should step up in key areas: military mobility, championing new technologies, bolstering resilience, fighting climate change and protecting the rules-based order”, he said.
For the Secretary General, the two organisations have “a lot in common and in a more competitive world we can do more together than alone”. In his view, stronger cooperation with the EU will be an important part of NATO’s work in the future.
The Secretary General of the Alliance recalled that his organisation was already cooperating closely with the EU in many areas such as the stabilisation of the neighbourhood, be it the Western Balkans or Ukraine, but also on illegal migration in the Aegean Sea or in the fight against hybrid threats, cyber attacks and disinformation campaigns.
Mr Stoltenberg also welcomed the EU’s defence efforts. An EU that spends more on defence, invests in new capabilities and reduces the fragmentation of the European defence industry “is not only good for European security, it is also good for transatlantic security”, he said. But the Secretary General did not fail to point out that EU Member States provide only 20% of NATO’s defence spending and that it was “obvious that the strong transatlantic link within NATO (remains) the cornerstone of Europe’s security, now and in the future”. (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)