On board the flight from Bavaria to Madrid yesterday, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan previewed U.S. expectations for the NATO summit which promises to jack up the confrontation against both Russia and China, starting with the new Strategic Concept that NATO will issue. “This Strategic Concept will describe in stark terms the threat that Russia poses and the way in which it has shattered peace in Europe,” Sullivan said. “It will speak very directly and in a clear-eyed way to the multifaceted challenge posed by the People’s Republic of China. And it will also address modern and emerging threats, cyber and emerging technologies, hybrid warfare, the growing national security implications of climate change, and of course, the evolving threat of terrorism, which has changed over the course of the 20 years since the Alliance went into Afghanistan back in 2001.”
“The other area where we expect to see a significant, indeed historic, set of deliverables is on the issue of force posture,” Sullivan went on later. “The President said before the war started that if Putin invaded Ukraine, the United States and NATO would enhance its force posture on the eastern flank, not just for the duration of the crisis, but to address the long-term change in the strategic reality that that would present.”
Sullivan also noted that Japan, Korea, Australia, and New Zealand will all be present as invited guests for the first time. “This is consistent with President Biden’s very strong view and central premise that the linkage in security between the Indo-Pacific and the Euro-Atlantic is only deepening,” he said. “And so, the ties between allies in the two theaters have to deepen as well, not because NATO is going to go be fighting wars in the Pacific but because there is an interconnection between the robustness and vitality of our Asia-Pacific alliances and our Euro-Atlantic alliances.”
With respect to China, Sullivan said in response to a question that the Biden Administration’s number one priority “when it comes to the war in Ukraine, is that China not become militarily supportive of Russia through the provision of equipment.” Secondly, “is that they not engage in wholesale or systematic undermining or evasion of U.S. sanctions.”
Vitaly Klitschko, the mayor of Kiev, is in Madrid to badger the alliance into supplying Ukraine with more weapons. Upon arrival at the summit venue, he told reporters: “Wake up, guys. This is happening now. You are going to be next, this is going to be knocking on your door just in the blink of an eye.”
