In mid-May, international experts met in Brussels at a joint conference by the Belgian Egmont Institute and the Federal Academy for Security Policy to discuss the prospects of the upcoming NATO Summit in Warsaw.

The NATO Summit in Warsaw on July 8 and 9 will be one of the key events in 2016. Already by now, it is expectable that not all of important key issues can be addressed, let alone be solved, there. In the run-up to the summit, the Belgian Egmont Institute (- The Royal Institute for International Relations) hosted an international expert seminar in cooperation with the Federal Academy for Security policy. During the well-founded contributions and discussions, the scholars and practitioners focused on “big issues that the north atlantic alliance cannot leave unaddressed for long anymore”, said Professor Sven Biscop, director of the ‘Europe in the World’ program at Egmont Institute.

Experts from Belgium, Great Britain, France, and the US, as well as from NATO explained the current state of the summit preparations and the perspectives of a long-term partnership with Russia. In addition the current challenges in the Mediterranean, NATO’s southern flank, were addressed. The President of the Federal Academy Dr Karl-Heinz Kamp, shed light on the signals pointing to a future use of nuclear weapons that are currently perceivable from the East. Therefore he pointed to the re-assessed question of nuclear deterrence and argued for a strategy concerning this matter. In his concluding remarks, Kamp emphasized that the changed security situation amounted to an entire paradigm shift. At the same time he expressed his confidence that NATO is capable and ready to master the challenges ahead.

Click here for the conference at the Egmont Institute Website.

Author: Wolfgang Nieter