NATO: Eastern Flank

Lord Touhig Excerpts

Monday 30th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

The noble Lord is quite right. Article 5 is one of the key components of the NATO treaty and all allies are cognisant of what that means should any member of the alliance be subject to an armed incursion or attack.

[Lord Touhig (Lab)]

My Lords, I endorse entirely the point made by my noble friend Lord West that we should keep a dialogue with the Russian Government open, and the NATO-Russia Council is perhaps a vehicle for doing that. The deployment of British forces in Estonia and Poland is purely defensive, but can the Minister assure us that this will be kept under review, and should it be the case, we would have the capacity to increase the number of troops we have placed there? Does he further agree that no one at all in this country or abroad should be in any doubt that if NATO invoked Article 5, we will respond if any of our allies in the Baltic are threatened?

[Earl Howe]

The noble Lord is absolutely right. The enhanced forward presence is undoubtedly a major step forward in NATO’s deterrence posture. These are forces that will reassure our allies. They will defend Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland, another NATO territory, and we believe that they will deter Russian belligerence on an enduring basis. The forces are designed to be defensive but combat-capable in order to show the Russians that should they be rash enough to contemplate any incursion into the Baltic states, that will be met with an appropriate response from NATO.