‘Common defence is a NATO mission’
‘Hike budget’
BRUSSELS, Feb 15, (Agencies): The transatlantic alliance and the EU agree “the common defence is a NATO mission alone,” US Defence Secretary James Mattis said Thursday after talks on Brussels’ own new defence pact.
NATO ministers met Wednesday with EU foreign policy chief Federica Mogherini to discuss their concerns over duplication after Brussels agreed in December to develop new military equipment and improve cooperation and decisionmaking.
“There is a clear understanding to include in written EU documents that the common defence is a NATO mission and a NATO mission alone,” Mattis told a press conference in Brussels.
Mattis said discussions were “very candid” between NATO, which includes European members, and Mogherini.
“We have sufficient rigour in the political sharing, the political discussions, to keep the EU effort, for example on military mobility,” Mattis said.
He said the EU can “enhance NATO common defense capabilities and does not draw from them.”
Defence
The EU’s so-called permanent structured cooperation on defence agreement, known as PESCO, has projects in view already to develop new military equipment and improve cooperation and decisionmaking.
But on Sunday a senior official working with Mattis said Washington had concerns that some of the proposed initiatives risked “pulling resources or capabilities away from NATO”.
Meanwhile, NATO SecretaryGeneral Jens Stoltenberg on Wednesday urged European allies and Canada to keep ramping up defense spending, as the alliance expands its command headquarters in response to a more assertive Russia.
Only eight of the 29 NATO member countries are forecast to reach this year the alliance’s spending guideline of 2 percent of GDP as the world’s biggest military alliance works to turn around over a quarter century of military cuts.
“To keep our nations safe, we need more defense spending, investment in key capabilities, and forces for NATO missions and operations,” Stoltenberg told reporters at a meeting of NATO defense ministers in Brussels.
The ministers, including Mattis, were to announce the creation of two new command centers to cover trans-Atlantic maritime transport routes and logistics and transport within Europe.
Command
The US is expected to take responsibility for the Atlantic command, while Germany is best placed for the logistics hub. Allies are also likely to announce the launch of a new cyberoperations center.
NATO nations cut defense spending and slashed staffing at its commands after the Cold War, but Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, following its war with Georgia in 2008, has spurred the allies to boost military budgets.
US President Donald Trump also publicly berated the Europeans and Canada at a summit last year, demanding that they start paying 2 percent on defense if they want Washington to stand by them in times of need. NATO leaders set that percentage as a guideline to aim for by 2024. Some, including Germany and Spain, will not make that benchmark.
The US spends more on defense than all the other allies combined.
Meanwhile, Poland’s right-wing Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki suggested Thursday, on the eve of a visit to Berlin, that Germany is a NATO “free rider” that spends too little on collective defence.
Without naming Germany itself, Morawiecki criticised alliance members that spend less on defence than the targeted two percent of GDP repeatedly insisted upon by Trump.
A country that benefits from NATO’s collective defence but spends just one percent of GDP, Morawiecki told Germany’s Die Welt daily, is “a free rider which threatens the unity of the West”.
Germany’s military spending amounts to 1.2 percent of gross domestic product.
Morawiecki also charged that “Europe isn’t taking defence seriously and living under the umbrella of Pax Americana,” according to the German-language article.