50 Days to Go: NATO Summit in Wales 2014

Pakistan has been invited to join leaders, senior ministers and Defence Chiefs from around 60 countries at the NATO summit in Wales in early September. The summit is planned to be the largest gathering of international leaders ever to take place in Britain. The summit comes as NATO draws down in Afghanistan, its longest ever mission, against the sombre backdrop of events in Ukraine.

The summit’s theme “Stronger together: Building stability in an unpredictable world” prompted me to reflect on how far NATO has shaped my world and my career, which started one month before the collapse of the Berlin Wall. I grew up in a Europe divided by the Iron Curtain across which NATO and the Warsaw Pact faced each other. And as a second lieutenant in the British reserve forces I had had a very small place in the plans for British reinforcement of NATO in West Germany if the Cold War turned hot.

It is hard now to recall the euphoria when the Soviet empire collapsed, but I remember very clearly the shock less than a year later when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. The formation of an unprecedented coalition to eject him, the thawing of the old Cold War lines and opening up of the possibility of tough action in the Security Council really did have us all talking about “building a new world order”. Well, that might have been how we in Europe entered the 1990s but the horrors that unfolded on our doorstep in the Former Yugoslavia ended all that.

I worked on defence and European security throughout the 90s, in London and at the UK mission in NATO, while the international community struggled to find the combination of political and military action that would stop the killing in former Yugoslavia and bring the warring parties to the negotiation table to find an enduring settlement. NATO played a key role throughout the conflict and, along with the High Representative, UN, EU, OSCE and other international organisations and NGOs, implemented the Dayton Peace Accords, proving itself a powerful actor for stability. Alongside the EU, NATO helped us realise the vision of a Europe whole and free. And since the turn of the century, the Alliance with an expanding number of partners has performed a stabilising role beyond the borders of Europe.

The 25 or so years since the disappearance of the Warsaw Pact has seen one unpredictable threat or challenge to global security after another and the NATO hosting the world’s leaders is not the NATO of 1989. Some things have stayed the same: it is the bedrock of the UK’s defence and security, our foremost military alliance representing the combined military capabilities of its then 15 now 28 members. NATO Allies are committed to collective defence, crisis management and cooperative security, working together to tackle challenges from fragile states to piracy, from terrorism to cyber attacks, to securing our borders and supporting our partners.

But NATO represents more than hard security. It is committed to the purposes and principles of the UN Charter and its members share enduring values, values enshrined in the 1975 Helsinki Final Act that promoted human rights behind the Iron Curtain and helped hasten the end of the Cold War. These include sovereign equality, refraining from the threat or use of force, territorial integrity of States, peaceful settlement of disputes, respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms (including the freedom of thought, conscience, religion or belief), equal rights and self-determination of peoples, co-operation among States, and fulfilment in good faith of obligations under international law.

As current events sharpen the focus around the summit, the UK’s aim remains the same – to ensure that NATO continues to be at the forefront of building stability in an unpredictable world.