NATO Brussels Summit 2018

Lord Browne of Ladyton Excerpts

Monday 16th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

As the Statement made clear, there was and is a sense of urgency and renewed commitment to move towards spending 2% of GDP on defence by 2024. It is only fair to say that our European allies and Canada, for instance, added $41 billion to their defence spending in 2017 alone. That is a commitment and we are confident that countries have a sense of urgency. We will continue to meet our commitment and will encourage our allies to do the same.

[Lord Browne of Ladyton (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for repeating the Statement. The Brussels declaration makes it clear that NATO’s posture on Russia continues to be defence and deterrence, on the one hand, and dialogue on the other. When the secretary-general was recently in London, he drew heavily on his own experience as Prime Minister of Norway and said something with which many of us agreed: namely, that defence and deterrence are insufficient alone and that dialogue is necessary. Indeed, the more difficult the relationship, the more dialogue there needs to be. So why do our Government seem content with their policy of having no high-level meetings with Russia? This leaves our NATO allies to conduct bilateral relations with Russia that involve, for example, Hungary, Italy, Greece or Turkey, where the Kremlin can count on a sympathetic ear and not, it appears, a robust voice, while the President of the United States said only today, quite clearly, that in his view the deterioration of US-Russia relations is a result of,

“many years of US foolishness and stupidity”.

All this undermines the integrity of the alliance and moves away from unity. Why do we not step up to the plate and engage in robust dialogue?

[Baroness Evans of Bowes Park]

As the noble Lord knows, NATO’s practical co-operation with Russia remains suspended but channels such as the NATO-Russia Council are an important means to keep dialogue open. He is right that we have suspended all planned high-level bilateral contacts with Russia, but we continue to engage with it multilaterally when it is in our interests to do so. It is in our mutual interests to reduce the risk of misunderstanding, miscalculation and unintended escalation. The Prime Minister has always been clear that our approach to Russia is “Engage, but beware”.