Ambassador Victoria Nuland
United States Permanent Representative to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
Institute of European Studies, Brussels, Belgium

Ambassador Nuland: Thank you very much Anthony, thank you Eva. It’s wonderful to be back on campus on a beautiful fall evening. I’m jealous of you all. I’m tempted to run away from NATO and stay, but I’m not sure my government would appreciate that.

I’m also delighted to be speaking to a younger audience tonight. This is something that I’m very committed to, taking our NATO alliance to the next generation and ensuring that it’s not just our fathers and grandfathers who understand what NATO is about, but that it’s all of you. You’ll have to take our great Alliance forward through the 21st century.

With that, let me start on a slightly different tack. As tomorrow’s diplomats, journalists, parliamentarians, international lawyers and business people, I know and I actually hope that you all consider it your first responsibility to strengthen and build the capacities of the European Union. You’re going to think that’s really strange, maybe even a little suspicious, to have a U.S. Ambassador to NATO standing up here urging you, the European leaders of tomorrow, to build a stronger EU. So why am I doing it?

I’m doing it because if we’ve learned anything in the last six years since 2001, but even more importantly over the past 60 or 100 years, it is that we need each other. We, the United States, need a Europe that is as strong and as united as possible; and you, I would argue, need a U.S. that is engaged and consulting with all of Europe. Because if we want to protect and keep what we have, we’ve all got to work to expand the liberal democratic zone, not only in Europe but around the world.

In today’s increasingly complex and dangerous world -- one where we’re threatened not only by terrorism and the spread of weapons of mass destruction, but one where we must also manage a Kremlin that has tightened its grip on state power; a China with choices to make about its own global role; and where we have to think about the risks posed by our collective hydrocarbon dependence and by the poverty, corruption and AIDS in too much of the developing world -- those of us who are blessed to be born in free societies have to strengthen the contribution that each of us individually and all of us collectively make to securing and growing the democratic world.

As the United States looks across the globe for partners in meeting these challenges, we of course look to our Asian allies and other strong democracies to our South and our East, but increasingly our first stop is at the European Union. Yes, of course, to the member states, but increasingly to the institution itself.

Just as our unity in the second half of the 20th Century helped us defeat fascism and Soviet communism, in the 21st Century we’ve got to work together to defeat terror, the spread of weapons of mass destruction, to find fair and economic solutions to our hydrocarbon dependence, to lift the poor and heal the sick, particularly in those nations that are struggling to live democratically as we do, and also to combat the twin scourges of corruption and misgovernment.

If in the last century we worked on problems like these individually with the nations of Europe, today a stronger, more capable EU means that we can increasingly draw on the institution to seek a common approach to common problems based on common interests and shared values. Today’s EU brings development aid, human rights standards, anti-corruption programs, police trainers, election monitors, cadre building skills and most importantly, increasingly, the capacity to bring all these things together in the right combination to meet the challenges of the moment -- witness the EU’s mission in Bosnia which is multi-faceted; East Timor; the role the EU played in galvanizing Europeans both on the security side and the development side to work together in Lebanon.

But just as the EU’s commitment to common action on the soft power side has gone up, our collective transatlantic commitment on the hard power side, objectively, has gone down.

If in 1980 the transatlantic average for defense spending was about three percent of gross domestic product, today it’s about 1.7 percent. That’s despite the fact that my nation, the largest Ally, is actually spending four cents of every tax dollar on hard security (let alone what we’re spending on homeland security).

Why has transatlantic security investment dropped? You know the answer. Because after the Cold War, we all took a peace dividend. Also because it was fashionable in Europe and in some salons in the United States in the ‘90s and beyond to believe that soft power was the only appropriate answer. That hard power was dangerous, that it drew enemies, and that its use was the mistake of overly militaristic societies.

And yet in the institution where I work, NATO, 26 Allies -- 21 of whom are also members of the European Union -- the TransAtlantic Alliance that never fired a shot in the Cold War is now conducting five operations on three continents including countering an insurgency in Afghanistan, 4,000 kilometers from the eastern edge of alliance territory with 35,000 troops in a mission in which all 26 Allies participate and 11 additional global partners join us, along with the EU, the UN and other institutions.

Why are we there? Because on September 11, 2001 and thereafter in London, Madrid, elsewhere, my nation and yours learned the hard way that what happens there matters here. Failed states and white spots on the map have become breeding grounds for terror, weapons of mass destruction and drugs, and they don’t limit their reach to the neighborhoods where they’re born. They threaten our way of life, our security, our prosperity -- all of those things that too many of us came to take for granted at the end of the Cold War.

So out of the cauldron of tragedy, that 1990s foreign policy argument about NATO -- “out of area or out or business” -- was settled decisively in favor of going together where the threats are, so that they don’t come to us.

But in today’s NATO this doesn’t just mean Afghanistan. Over the past six years the nations of the Alliance have launched a full time anti-terrorist patrolling mission in the Mediterranean; we’ve trained Iraqi military officers, some 5,000 in Baghdad; we’ve trained the African Union in Darfur and in Addis; we’ve flown humanitarian aid to Pakistan and the U.S. Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina; we’ve strengthened our collective capacity to get to the fight with the NATO Response Force and with long range aircraft; we’ve built new capabilities against chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear weapons and to counter improvised explosive devices both in the field and at home; and we’ve kept almost 16,000 peacekeepers in Kosovo.

Perhaps most importantly, we’ve taken that round table in Brussels where NATO members sit -- where we once sat to count Soviet warheads and plan where we were going to put our own -- and we’ve turned it into a full-time forum for consultation on all of the global challenges that the TransAtlantic democracies face, from Afghanistan to Iran, from energy security to the challenge of a more assertive Russia, even as we’ve also found areas where in the NATO-Russia Council we can work together.

NATO remains the only full-time TransAtlantic consultative body where North Americans and Europeans sit all day long -- and believe me, I do a lot of sitting all day long -- to try to identify and solve collective security challenges. As such I would argue it’s even more important today than when our fathers and grandfathers founded it. (Sorry women, they were all fathers and grandfathers.)

The bottom line as my friend George Robertson used to say, “This ain’t your Daddy’s NATO,” or your Grandaddy’s NATO in the case of your generation.

And yet, what we’ve done is not enough.

As we head toward the next NATO Summit in Bucharest in April 2008 and also towards NATO’s 60th Birthday in 2009, we’ve got to do more to give our people the security they expect and to meet the challenge that my boss, Condi Rice, threw out to all of us when she was confirmed as Secretary of State -- to create “a balance of power in the world that favors freedom.”

So as we head towards Bucharest we are looking at strengthening NATO across four major lines. First, strengthening NATO as a global security provider. Second, strengthening NATO in its capacity to deliver security in our homelands. Third, strengthening a Europe whole, free and at peace, especially in the Balkans. And fourth, increasingly building a NATO that can serve as the core of a global security community of democracies that work together in common purpose.

First, NATO the global security provider. This is primarily about Afghanistan. We, the NATO Allies, the TransAtlantic community, have made a commitment to the people of Afghanistan that we will stand by them as they work to build a stable, free and democratic society, as they struggle to beat the challenges of terror, drugs and corruption in their midst. That means between now and Bucharest, our ISAF mission has to grow even stronger. We’ve got to get our commanders all the forces they need. We’ve got to increase our commitment to training Afghan security forces so that they can take the operational lead, with us in support. And we’ve got to ensure that our NATO mission also supports the counter-narcotics efforts of the Afghans themselves. This is NATO as a global security provider, far from our shores in Afghanistan.

Second, NATO in our homelands. What does that mean? It means that we no longer need to think about great brigades of forces standing along the Fulda Gap getting ready to defend against Soviet armies. Instead we have to be ready to face asymmetric threats and terror at home. That means building defenses against CBRN. It means having missile defenses against a growing Iranian missile threat. It means cyber defenses. One of our allies last year suffered an aggressive attack on its national cyber structures, and NATO had relatively little to bring to bear. It means a NATO contribution to energy security.

The third line, NATO in the Balkans. You all know NATO as the organization that went into Bosnia in the ‘90s and then into Kosovo. You also know it as the institution that, through its successive enlargements which have been mirrored by EU enlargements, we’ve brought many of the former Yugoslav states closer to us. As we head towards Bucharest we are also heading towards a UN-mandated final status solution in Kosovo. If we can find a solution for Kosovo, if we can help Albania, Croatia, Macedonia who aspire to be NATO members and have been working for almost a decade to get there, across the finish line, we can have a Bucharest Summit where the NATO that took the Balkans from war to peace, takes the Balkans increasingly from peace to European integration, and supports those processes in the EU as well.

The last point, NATO as a global security forum. What do I mean by that? I mean that today we talk not just about the 26, but we also talk about NATO plus its global partners -- some 40 countries on five continents who work with the Alliance, whether we’re talking about Australia and New Zealand who have forces with us in Afghanistan, Morocco who has forces with us in Kosovo, or all of the countries who are developing individual partnership programs with the alliance. Increasingly NATO is providing a forum for the democracies of the world to meet in partnership to defend their common security interests. So NATO is not just the 26 any more; it’s increasingly becoming the core of a global democratic security community.

But as I said at the beginning, today’s problems require a combination of hard and soft instruments, and the combined commitment and legitimacy of North America and Europe. That takes me back to the EU.

Last year in a moment of frustration, the NATO Secretary General de Hoop Scheffer, called the dysfunctional relationship between NATO and the EU a “frozen conflict”. That upset a number of Europeans, but it rang too true.

Today in Afghanistan, in Kosovo, in other parts of the world we see it’s no longer a matter of which of those two institutions will go, but of ensuring that we all go and when we get there, we work seamlessly together.

I’m not talking about combining the institutions or even melding their mandates, don’t worry. That wouldn’t make any sense either for Europe or for North America. Europe needs a place where it can act independently, and we need a Europe that is able and willing to do so in defense of our common interests and values.

But if we’ve learned anything in Iraq and Afghanistan it is that there can be no real development without security and there can be no security without development. We’ve got to combine our efforts. We can’t just show up in some far-flung part of the world and hope it’s going to work out between us. We’ve got to work together from the start, all the nations of these institutions and the institutions themselves. We’ve got to plan together, we’ve got to adjust the mission together, and we’ve got to stay together while preserving the autonomy of each institution.

With 21 of our members sitting in both the EU and NATO now, with greater understanding on both sides of the Atlantic that we need each other and we need all of our national resources – hard and soft power, political, economic, military, good-governance tools -- to solve today’s problems, it only makes sense that we work together.

And as we’ve all learned the hard way, history has not ended. If we care about democracy and peace, we have to be stronger than those who oppose them, and we’ve got to be stronger than those who would freely resort to violence to get their way. And equally important, our fragile friends need to know that we will come to their assistance when necessary with our blood and our treasure.

So today I would submit to you that our continued freedom, security and prosperity and those of our friends depend on a strong EU, a strong NATO, and a stronger relationship between them. This is going to take courage, it’s going to take creativity, it’s going to take vision, and it’s going to take more national investment from each of our countries.

My generation is going to start this work. I hope your generation will finish it.

Thank you very much.