Brussels, 16/11/2021
Remarks
Check against delivery!
It has been a busy day, [both] yesterday and today. We had a [working] breakfast, lunch and dinner. Today, also, we had [a working] lunch with the Secretary General of NATO [Jens Stoltenberg]. It has been a marathon about [EU] Defence Policy and, in particular, the Strategic Compass.
Let me start with the Strategic Compass, which I presented yesterday evening to the Foreign Affairs and Defence Ministers altogether in what we call a Jumbo meeting. I want to stress once again here that this document is not just another policy document. It is a guide for action with concrete measures and timelines.
If you want to talk about defence, you have to talk about challenges or threats, because you defend [yourself] from something. The first thing you need is a sound assessment of your strategic environment. This is what we did. Last year [we did] an assessment [of] the threats and challenges. The overall view is that we are witnessing instability, conflicts, transnational threats that impact our security and certainly using hybrid tactics as we see today at the border with Belarus. Something that some months ago was even difficult to imagine.
In the Foreword to the Strategic Compass, I wrote – and I think that is very timely to remember – that the classic distinction between war and peace has been diminishing; [it] is not black and white. The world is full of hybrid situations where we face intermediate dynamics of competition, intimidation, and coercion. What we are seeing today in the Polish and Lithuanian border with Belarus is a typical example of that.
This illustrates very well what I wrote even before [the crisis in Belarus] that we face a hybrid war with a lot of greys between black and white, between peace and classical war, where everything is being weaponised. This is a perfect example of the challenges that I was describing in my Foreword to the Strategic Compass.
The first thing to do in practical terms [is] to identify the challenges and second, [identify] how to respond to them, to which and to how, with which means. I have been discussing and explaining to the Ministers – [this] is the first public press conference in which I am explaining publicly – [what] the Compass is about, we have been analysing the four dimensions of the compass and we refer to them with four verbs: to secure, to act, to invest, and to partner.
First, to act. The European Union needs to be able to act more rapidly and decisively in response to crises. We need to take decisions faster, to be more flexible and to adopt more robust mandates for our missions. In this context is where I propose to develop a European Union Rapid Deployment Capacity that would allow to swiftly deploy modular forces up to a certain number, that we put on 5,000 troops. But based on operational scenarios, it is the missions who determine the force that you have to use, the capabilities that you have to use, and these forces and capabilities have to train together, exercise together, to increase their interoperability and readiness.
This is one of the most important messages: We need to act robustly, rapidly, and decisively in response to crisis. For that, we have to have the capacities to deploy together forces.
The second one is to secure. We need to strengthen our overall resilience and our capacity to protect the union and its citizens against the new kind of cyber-attacks and hybrid threats. That is why we propose to develop a Hybrid Toolbox to ensure a more coordinated response to hybrid campaigns, such as to further develop responses to impose costs on the perpetrators of foreign disinformation manipulation and interference. The cyberspace and the outer space will be the new battlefields of the new wars. We have to be prepared to fight there: cyber, maritime and space. That is why we propose [the] European Union Cyber Defence Policy and Space Strategy to complement our security and defence. This has a civilian dimension and a military dimension. Both have to be developed.
The third is to invest, because if we want to act, we need capacities. We need to have the right capacities, or capabilities, and, through the Compass, we have identified the critical capability shortfalls that we still have, and the need to fill these gaps. We have to be at the cutting edge of the technological innovation, reduce fragmentation and dependencies of our defence markets. We have to increase our industrial capabilities to produce the tools and means that we need to be at the forefront of technology of the new warfare.
Finally, but not the least important, is to partner. In the Compass, we propose a more ambitious partnership and cooperation on security and defence, first, with NATO. Today we had lunch with the Secretary General of NATO [Jens Stoltenberg]. Everybody stressed the importance of increasing, strengthening and reinforcing our cooperation with NATO, because the Strategic Compass is a way of making NATO stronger by making the European Union stronger.
President [Joe] Biden [of the United States] and President [Emmanuel] Macron [of France] said that [it] is is an important cornerstone for us. To increase the military capabilities of the European Union is a way of increasing and reinforcing the global security, the transatlantic link in complementarity with NATO. But if something complements another thing, it means they are not the same thing. In complementarity to NATO means that the European Union not only has Member States who are members of NATO, but [it] has the ambition to build a Common Security and Defence Policy to use its own capacities alone, when necessary, and together, where possible.
Concretely, the Compass outlines why we need a stronger Union ready to protect citizens, values and interests of the Europeans. It will enhance the strategic responsibility, or autonomy – whatever you want to call it -, our ability to work with partners to safeguard our values and interests. This approach was broadly supported by the Ministers. They expressed their readiness to continue working on it actively, in view of the adoption of the final Compass at the March [2022] European Union Council.
In the meantime, from here to March, I will present at least two new drafts of the Compass incorporating the result of the work that is going to be done in different working groups of the Council. In general, I have to say that Member States supported the approach of defence capabilities, addressing hybrid challenges and engaging with partners.
Ministers underlined the fact that our approach has to be complementary with NATO certainly; beneficial to NATO, certainly; avoiding duplication, certainly; but duplications have to be avoided from both sides and ensuring coherence. In my view, this is fully guaranteed by the text I presented, because it is part of our ambition.
The important thing is to be able to translate ambition into action. That is why the Compass has a clear timeline and a review process. This will help to achieve it and to implement it.
The [discussion on the Strategic Compass] was yesterday. This morning we started with the Steering Board of the European Defence Agency. We discussed defence innovation. The Agency was created by a Treaty. It is not an invention of the External Action Service or myself. [It] was created by the Treaty to have a body that pushes for European defence common action in the field of capabilities. Today, the Ministers agreed on a set of revised principles for cooperation with third parties and, in particular, they endorsed the mandate for negotiating an Administrative Arrangement between the European Defence Agency, which I have the honour to head, and United States Department of Defence. This is a clear sign [that we are] strengthening transatlantic defence cooperation and, in parallel, we are working to launch a dedicated dialogue on security and defence between the European Union and the United States.
During the Council, I updated Defence Ministers on the mandate renewable of the United Nations Security Council on the European Union Force Bosnia and Herzegovina (EUFOR Althea). That is good news.
I also informed Ministers about the steps that we are taking to use the Coordinated Maritime Presences – a concept that is also part of the Compass but is already being implemented in the Gulf of Guinea – and how we could establish a new specific Maritime Area of Interest in the Indo-Pacific early next year. We have to continue building on the common strategic culture of our Member States, because the Indo-Pacific is very close for some and very far from others. But we will have to share our threats and challenges and we will have to put on the table everything that can be a problem for us. The Indo-Pacific area is one of the scenarios in which the European Union has to engage.
We discussed about Belarus. Belarus is not a migration crisis. We must respond with all possible tools to our disposal, and the Hybrid Toolbox that we are proposing in the Compass would be extremely relevant to face this kind of situations.
We discussed the new projects of PESCO, the [EU] Training Missions that we are deploying in Mozambique, how we can be more effective in Mali, Somalia and [the] Central African Republic.
To summarise, the Compass includes a number of concrete proposals to strengthen mandates to make our missions more agile, better equipped to respond to disinformation campaigns, being able to proper advising, mentoring, equipping and helping to reform the defence sector of our partners.
Lastly, during the lunch, we hosted [NATO] Secretary General Stoltenberg. We talked about EU-NATO cooperation, about resilience, climate, emerging and disruptive technologies. I think there was a big agreement on the need to advance together and strengthen our cooperation. It should be clear now that the Strategic Compass has nothing to do with duplication of NATO capacities. It is a matter of making the European pillar inside NATO stronger, and on doing so making NATO stronger, and the Transatlantic relationship also stronger.
Certainly, we discussed also about the Russian military build-up at the Ukrainian border. Let me say that we stand strongly and firmly behind Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty. But I am sure you will ask more about it.
Link to the video: EC AV PORTAL (europa.eu)