NATO summit to retool alliance to face new threats
WARSAW, Poland — In what some are terming NATO’s most important meeting in a generation, U.S. President Barack Obama and the leaders of the 27 other member nations are deciding how to retool the Cold War-era military alliance to face a daunting range of modern threats, from a hostile Kremlin to religious-fueled violence and attacks in cyberspace.
They meet in the Polish capital, Warsaw, for a two-day summit starting Friday.
“We live in a more dangerous world, with terrorism, with turmoil, especially to the south of the alliance, in Iraq, Syria, North Africa,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told The Associated Press. “But also with a Russia which is more assertive, a Russia which has tripled its defence spending since 2000, and which has used force against an independent nation in Europe, Ukraine.”
“This has really changed our security environment,” Stoltenberg said. “NATO has to respond. When the world is changing, we have to change.”