By all accounts, U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin III was a big hit with his NATO colleagues yesterday. According to the Pentagon readout, Austin addressed two sessions of the NATO defense ministers meeting yesterday. The first session discussed deterrence and defense, burden sharing, and Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg’s ‘NATO 2030’ initiative. The second session discussed trans-Atlanticism, NATO-EU relations, Alliance resilience, and emerging and disruptive technologies. Austin reaffirmed President Joe Biden’s message that the United States intends to revitalize the US relationship with the NATO Alliance and that the commitment to Article 5 remains ironclad.
According to a report in Politico, Austin “charmed” his fellow defense ministers. Unnamed officials reported that during the two sessions, Austin played “all the right mood music” by expressing a willingness to consult and a full-throated commitment to NATO’s principle of collective defense.
The subhead later in the Politico article says it all: “New life after brain death,” a direct reference to the comment made by French President Emanuel Macron in 2019. It’s as if the alliance has been resurrected after four years of being in a Trump-induced hell. “We have the upcoming summit, we have the NATO 2030, we have a new U.S. administration,” Stoltenberg said. “And all of that together really provides a unique opportunity, after some difficult years for all of us on both sides of the Atlantic, to have a substantive forward-looking agenda.”
