official texts and speeches
Transatlantic Cooperation Through NATO
Ambassador Charles P. Ries
Supreme Joint War College, Thessaloniki
February 7, 2006
Thank you very much Admiral Kourkoulis, and all of you for being here today. I very much appreciate the opportunity to speak to the Supreme Joint War College; it is a great honor for me and a great honor for my country.
It is a particular honor to be here because I think that the Greek military does a really remarkable job of military education, and this institution is one of the Greek state’s finest resources. The ancient Greeks – your forebears and my forebears – understood how important it was for warriors also to be scholars. Thuycidides, Pericles, Herodotus were fighting men as much as they were scholars and statesmen. Alexander the Great, a little closer to home here, had Aristotle for a tutor. We all should be so lucky.
Today, we know education is an essential part of a professional military. It is one of the key strengths of our bilateral defense relationship. Every year hundreds of Greek soldiers travel to the United States for training – some for a few days or weeks, some for months or longer. This impressive representation at U.S. staff colleges, service schools, and other military training facilities is the product of close cooperation and mutual investment. For example, in 2005, my government provided $1 million in International Military Education and Training funds to pay the tuition of nearly one hundred Greek military personnel in the United States. For its part, the Greek government more than matches this sum, providing transportation, lodging, and other expenses for soldiers funded by the IMET program and sending hundreds of additional soldiers to America for training under other programs.
As a result, there is a large cadre of Greek officers familiar with the United States, our military systems, and our way of doing business. Admiral, I understand that you attended the Navy Postgraduate School in California. I know that there are at this school and in this audience today students from other countries in the region, as well as Major Pete Huie from the United States.
Greece and the United States are bound together by more than ties of sentiment and mutual understanding. For more than a generation, we have been linked with other like-minded countries by what was described as the world’s most successful military alliance. Today, you cannot talk about our bilateral relationship or the Transatlantic relationship without talking about NATO. You cannot talk about our bilateral successes without referring to our multilateral endeavors. You cannot talk about our future together as strategic partners without talking about our future together in NATO.
When we talk about NATO in the United States, we do so almost reverentially. It is, literally, for us, an alliance with a capital “A” -- when you see the word “alliance” capitalized in the United States it refers to NATO. There is no doubt that this reverence that we have for it, is well earned. After the collapse of Hitler’s 3rd Reich and the defeat of fascism in Europe, our leaders linked the fortunes of a community of democracies through a series of agreements, partnerships, and common understandings. At the heart of this network of ties was NATO. For decades, until the collapse of the Soviet Union, NATO was the pillar of security in Europe. We faced difficult decisions and hard choices over that period, but the act of making these choices made us stronger as a community.
However, when the Soviet Union collapsed, many people – including many in the United States, asked whether we still needed NATO. Had the institution that guaranteed the security of the West for fifty years become an anachronism? Had the costs of maintaining the Alliance come to outweigh its benefits? Was there in fact any role for an organization now that, as academic Francis Fukuyama once famously observed, history had come to an end, because it was thought that the struggle of ideologies would come to an end?
The end of the Cold War also brought an end to the international system that ensured rigid, almost artificial, stability in international relations. Just as we in the West often papered over our differences on many issues in the face of a common external threat, longstanding ethnic and national conflicts in Europe were tamped down by the Cold War imperative of maintaining internal stability and external cohesion.
Nowhere was this more true than in the former Yugoslavia, the incubator of world wars, where different ethnic, religious, and political groups managed to coexist, uneasily perhaps, only because of the presence of an oppressive and ideological state apparatus. The end of the Cold War brought an end to the ideological, political, and economic lifelines for this system. The end of the Cold War lifted the lid off this cauldron, and the result was ethnic cleansing, rising nationalism, and serious instability.
Imagine that those who had urged us to declare victory and dissolve the Alliance had won the day back in 1990. Imagine that if we, as an Alliance, had decided that bearing the burdens of collective security was no longer justified.
What if we had closed up NATO and had not been there – albeit imperfectly and haltingly at first – to intervene to stop the ethnic cleansing in Bosnia and Herzegovina, or to prevent Kosovo from touching off an even bloodier conflict in the region?
Without NATO’s involvement, would the final status of Kosovo be a matter of negotiation between the parties involved as it is now, or would it be a matter for contending armies and partisans? What international institution would have been there to keep the serious tensions from spilling over into the surrounding areas and countries?
Without the influence of NATO's Membership Action Plan would there be a government in Skopje that is restructuring its military, shrinking it to a fraction of its former size, and moving to bring it into line with European and Atlantic norms and standards?
In all of these cases, I would argue, without NATO’s presence it is easy to see a far darker situation than what prevails today. With NATO, Greece finds itself surrounded by neighbors who are Allies or on the road to becoming so. Of the four countries that border Greece, two are now full members of the Alliance and the other two are implementing the political, military, economic, judicial, and other reforms required in NATO’s Membership Action Plan.
NATO has been the engine of transatlantic cooperation; the forum where we sit down and discuss as partners the threats we face. But NATO has also provided the framework in which the EU has been able to establish its own security identity. The EU has made impressive strides in coordinating and setting foreign and security policy – an effort the United States supports entirely. The establishment of the EU battle groups was, for example, a remarkable achievement in this process, but it took as its foundation the interoperability standards and coordination mechanisms put in place by NATO.
NATO survived and thrives because what it does, it does well. NATO survived and thrives because it is flexible and adaptable. NATO survived and thrives because it is the institution that links American and European security. NATO survived and thrives because we understood that the collapse of the Soviet Union changed, but did not end, the security challenges we face.
It was in fact ironic that, after guarding against a threat
from the east for many years, NATO troops were first employed in an Article 5
collective self-defense action 3,000 miles further west. For several months after September 11, 2001, NATO AWACs, with pilots from
throughout the AllianceGreece,
patrolled the skies off the east coast of the United
States.
Americans are grateful to NATO for its help at our time of need.
Right now, NATO is engaged in seven operations around the
world. Only one of these – Operation
Active Endeavor – is an Article 5 operation.
The rest, from Afghanistan
to Kosovo to Darfur, are in support of NATO’s new,
broader concept of security, based on the understanding that geography is
increasingly irrelevant when we talk about threats in the modern world.
Back in the 1990s, we debated for months about whether NATO should be involved “out of area,” even though the “out of area” concerned at the time was the Balkans. This “out of area” debate effectively ended on September 11, 2001.
Since that time, NATO has taken on responsibilities from the east coast of the United States to the eastern Indian Ocean. On October 10 of last year, the government of Pakistan requested NATO’s assistance in responding to an earthquake that was one of the world’s worst natural disasters. It took NATO – that is to say it took our governments – mere hours to respond. On October 11, the North Atlantic Council voted to accept a major role in providing relief to the millions of people in need.
By the time NATO concluded this mission at the beginning of this month, NATO planes had carried over 150 sorties from Europe, delivering more than 3000 tons of relief supplies – 100 tons of which traveled in Greek C-130s. NATO helicopters ferried more than 1600 tons of supplies to remote mountain villages in Kashmir. NATO medics and Air Mobile Medical Teams treated nearly 10,000 Pakistanis injured by the quake and its aftereffects. NATO engineers cleared roads, built clinics, installed sanitation systems, and made friends.
Where we have the capacity to act, we often have the responsibility to act. NATO’s Euro-Atlantic Disaster Relief Coordination Center, which has played a crucial role in sending help to stricken areas around the world, was established as a result of the 1998 earthquake in Turkey; the earthquake that inspired Greece’s “earthquake diplomacy” initiatives. By enhancing our ability to address humanitarian disasters worldwide, disaster relief coordination center promotes our security here at home.
Just as we need to respond to global tragedies, we need to counteract global threats. What happens far away can still have an impact in Greece. Weak states, failing states, and terrorist states harm Greek interests, security and prosperity just as they harm American interests and security. Recently, for example, pirates off the coast of Somalia attacked a cruise liner, illustrating the seriousness of the asymmetric maritime security threat. While the ship in this case was Panamanian, much of the world’s shipping has a Greek connection; Greek flag, Greek ownership, Greek crew, or Greek insurer. Greece and America share an interest in having a capability to respond. NATO provides that capability, and the framework for coordinating between our navies in making the world seas safer.
Our interests -- Greek, European, and American -- are truly global. Rather than engaging in uncoordinated security initiatives around the world, we consult and act together whenever possible. NATO is the channel by which we do this.
Looking ahead, we believe NATO needs to continue to adapt and change to keep pace with the changing nature of the threats we face. The Alliance is working to expand its capability to deploy forces and to sustain them in the field. We need to accelerate these efforts. As we change how we think about what the Alliance can and should do, we need to make sure we have the equipment to get those new jobs done. Transformation therefore will be topic #1 at NATO’s November Summit in Riga.
We need to look at making key enablers – airlift, tankers, and combat support – part of our common resources, as we have already done with AWACs. Military people like to say, “Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.” Does it make sense that, after volunteering to provide the Role 2 medical facility for ISAF in Kabul, Greece had the additional burden of procuring the necessary equipment to use? Wouldn’t it make sense to own commonly, and fund commonly, these basic essentials for mobile capabilities?
Of course, if we want new capabilities, we need to look at how we will pay for them. Some of this involves moving money around – shifting from national priorities to Alliance priorities. Much of it, though, may require governments, and especially some of our Allies in Europe, that unlike Greece Defense is expensive but, as we have seen, the failure to defend ourselves is even more costly. dedicate only 1 or 2% of their GDP to defense, to spend more.
We need to expand partnerships, to cement the Atlantic and European orientation of those countries in the region (many of which are Greece’s neighbors) and to integrate the countries of the Middle East into the same framework of shared security. These contacts can have a concrete, positive, even life-saving impact.
One brief example. In August 2000, the Russian submarine Kursk sank with the loss of 118 crewmembers. NATO-Russia ties at the time were in their infancy, and Russia did not ask and did not want the help that the Alliance Flash forward to August 2005, when another Russian submarine became trapped underwater during an exercise, threatening the lives of its crew. This tale, unlike that of the doomed Kursk, had a happy ending. The British commander of the ship that rescued the crew had recently trained with the Russians on submarine search and rescue, as part of the links established by the NATO-Russia Council. The commander said it was this training that helped him work with his Russian colleagues during the very successful rescue. could have provided.
We need to build on successes like this in all of our partnerships. NATO needs to act as a catalyst for stability. Establishing peace in Bosnia so the EU could step in and foster development; training African Union soldiers so they can help stabilize their own continent; providing the infrastructure of security in the provinces of Afghanistan so that NGOs and aid agencies can foster economic development, these are all part of NATO’s security operations.
Greece plays a major role in this success. You are a leader when the Alliance goes to sea; in Operation Active Endeavor, through the NATO Maritime Interdiction Operation Training Center that will be the Alliance’s repository of knowledge on the subject when it begins its operation shortly in Crete, and in the impressive sealift capability you demonstrated when you moved Hungarian tanks and Greek BMPs to reinforce the Iraqi military in the run up to last December’s very successful elections.
Of course, the most visible manifestations of the Alliance’s commitment to promoting, supporting, and ensuring stability in critical areas are NATO operations on the ground. This is hard, frequently dangerous, and often expensive work, particularly as we move beyond Europe.
All of us have struggled with the difficulties involved in dispatching troops hundreds, if not thousands, of miles from home. Nonetheless, Greece has made invaluable contributions to NATO operations in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Darfur, and to the NATO relief effort in the United States in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, just last fall. On Hurricane Katrina, let me again especially thank the Greek people, its military and government for their generosity in our time of need.
Last week’s debate in the Netherlands on the renewed commitment of Dutch troops to a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Afghanistan shows how difficult these issues can be. But in deciding decisively to take on this mission as well, the Dutch have once again proven their mettle and their dedication to our common defense. The members of the Alliance, on both sides of the Atlantic, can well appreciate how important getting this right will be for all of us – for Americans, for the Europeans, the Dutch, the Greeks, and the Afghans themselves.
We are also working together to increase NATO’s role as a consultative mechanism. Many people think that Americans and Europeans do not talk to each other enough. As we see it, NATO is the principal institution of the transatlantic community, and one that is well-suited to serve as a forum for high-level discussion and consensus-building on a wide range of issues. We’re committed to this security dialogue at the highest levels. We also believe that we should bring other like-minded democracies who are participating as partners in NATO operations, such as Japan and Australia.
As members of NATO, we are often called upon to do difficult and dangerous things, often in faraway places. We are called upon to make sacrifices. We are called upon to share the rewards, but also the risks and costs, of maintaining security for our people. But we face those challenges as Allies who have stood by each other, who know the value of doing a difficult job well, and who understand the importance of the sacrifices we make.
Thank you very much.