Government of Portugal

10/09/2021 | Press release | Archived content

Europe needs to 'invest and cooperate more among itself' to strengthen NATO Atlantic Alliance Parliamentary Assembly held in Lisbon

2021-10-09 at 15h23

Europe needs to "invest and cooperate more among itself" to strengthen NATO

Portuguese Minister of State and Foreign Affairs, Augusto Santos Silva

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The Portuguese Minister of State and Foreign Affairs Augusto Santos Silva claimed that "Europe's defence and security autonomy is not carried out outside of NATO" and added that the EU countries must "take on more responsibility, invest and cooperate more among each other" to strengthen the North Atlantic Treaty Organization - NATO.

The Minister gave a speech at the Atlantic Alliance's Parliamentary Assembly, held on 9 and 10 October in Lisbon and recalled that NATO "is a political and military alliance founded on the values and political institutions" of the North Atlantic "democracies, of an exclusively defensive nature" and underlined that "we are not a threat to anyone".

The Minister offered to the Parliamentary Assembly's political committee Portugal's view on the political and security matters deemed essential under the organization's new strategic concept, which will be approved at the summit scheduled for June 2022 in Madrid, following on from what was adopted in 2010 at the Lisbon Summit. Santos Silva was, at the time, the Minister of Defence.

Recalling that NATO is organized "on the principle of lessons learned", the Minister of State and Foreign Affairs underlined the need for the Alliance to learn from recent events in Afghanistan, where in August, a presence that had been on site for two decades was withdrawn. "The military know how to do that better than anyone, but we also do it at a political level, whether in Government or Parliament", he said.

Although the case of Afghanistan is a "painful exercise", it is fundamental to face other situations, such as Libya, which "projects instability and threats" onto Northern and Central Africa.

Threats and Challenges

Augusto Santos Silva defined international terrorism as the current main threat yet indicated "Russia's aggressive behaviour" as a highly important threat, and "China's growing assertiveness" as a new challenge.

"The new challenges posed by climate change call NATO to act on its three tasks: collective defence, managing crisis, and cooperative security", he said.

The Minister also noted that NATO has the double advantage of being a political alliance of democracies and leading security and defence technology, underlining the importance of the alliance not losing the "advantage it's always had" in terms of technology.

"This requires an outstanding effort from us because we need to be better prepared to face up to hybrid warfare, cyber-attacks, disinformation, the campaigns to weaken our main strength, which is public opinion in our countries", he noted.

The force of democracy

Santos Silva indicated "public diplomacy" as essential for NATO, noting that "the fact we advocate in favour of peace, security, stability, and cooperation is an essential item for the political force we have, and which enabled us to win the Cold War without a single shot fired".

The Minister also referred to the need to increase defence budgets, pointing to the role of the Portuguese Armed Forces in the logistics in the Covid-19 vaccination process, noting that it represented "a new legitimacy of the Armed Forces".