# NATO Foreign Ministers Meet - New Directions For NATO?



## FJAG (1 Dec 2020)

NATO Foreign Ministers are meeting today in Brussels. 

Concurrently Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg received an experts' report on how to keep NATO relevant going forward. See article here.

A transcript of Stoltenberg's press conference after the first days meeting is here.

Note in particular the organization's willingness to address China:



> JENS STOLTENBERG: One important part of the report is, of course, also to address the fact that we are faced with more and more global challenges. And one of the aims with NATO 2030 is to make NATO a more global Alliance, or at least that we have a more global approach. We should remain a regional Alliance, a North Atlantic Alliance, but we need a global approach, because more and more of the threats and challenges we face are global.
> 
> One of them is the rise of China. And we see that China is coming closer to us, investing heavily in infrastructure in NATO countries, in Europe, also in the Black Sea Region. And, as you know, three Black Sea countries are NATO countries, two are NATO partners, Ukraine and Georgia. And for NATO, we realise the importance of resilience, of protecting our critical infrastructure. And we have developed and we are strengthening our requirements, what we call baseline requirements for resilience, to critical infrastructure, telecommunications, a continuation of government, health, and many other critical services in our societies.



China, for its part, answered with the usual platitudes:



> On Tuesday, China’s Foreign Ministry spokesperson Hua Chunying said Beijing advocates for global peace and security and not intimidation or coercion as suggested by preliminary information released on the report.
> 
> He added that China was a victim of coercive diplomacy and that its spending on military per capita was lower than many other countries.



See here.

 :cheers:


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## Good2Golf (31 Dec 2020)

...note how good spokesperson Chunying was careful to add the ‘per capital’ qualifier?

It helps to lower the statical cost when your country has 1.4B citizens...

‘lies, damned lies and statistics...’


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