NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg hosted another press conference following the first day of the NATO foreign minsters’ meeting yesterday, virtually identical to the one he had held the day before, prior to the convening of the meeting. The only substantive difference was the release of NATO 2030, commissioned by Stoltenberg himself following French President Emmanuel Macron’s characterization of the alliance as “brain dead” in November of 2019. “Their report shows that NATO is agile,” Stoltenberg said. “It recognizes that in recent years we have been able to adapt, both militarily and politically. The report also demonstrates that political consultation and decision-making work at NATO.” In response to one reporter’s question, he said, “So, the purpose of NATO 2030 and the message in the report, which is an input into the NATO 2030 project, is that we should make a strong Alliance even stronger.”
According to the German press agency DPA, one of the ideas floated in the report is to make the veto of decisions harder. “To deal with the growing frequency of single-country blockages involving external bilateral disputes, it should consider raising the threshold for such blockages,” the document states. This is unlikely to meet with the approval of all allies, DPA reports. As it stands now, all NATO decisions have to be unanimous, something difficult to achieve in an alliance with 30 members.
Otherwise, the main focus of press reporting on the NATO 2030 report is what it says about China. According to the Wall Street Journal, the report says that NATO should devote much more of its time and resources to security threats posed by China even while seeking to deter (alleged) Russian aggression. “NATO must devote much more time, political resources and action to the security challenges posed by China — based on an assessment of its national capabilities, economic heft, and the stated ideological goals of its leaders,” the experts said, reported Bloomberg. “It needs to develop a political strategy for approaching a world in which China will be of growing importance through to 2030.”
