News

On 24 March, Lithuania’s Minister of Foreign Affairs Audronius Ažubalis will meet with members of the Group of Experts on NATO’s new Strategic Concept: Canadian diplomat Marie Gervais-Vidricaire, former German diplomat Hans Friedrich von Ploetz and joint representative from the Baltic States to the group, Latvian diplomat Aivis Ronis.

During the meeting, Minister A.Ažubalis will introduce Lithuania’s goals with regard to the forthcoming NATO’s Strategic Concept: maintaining a strong principle of collective defence, appropriate NATO’s policy when confronting new threats (such as energy security, cyber-defence, or other), continuing the Alliance’s open door policy, shaping a pragmatic, but principled NATO’s position on relations with Russia. The participants of the meeting also intend to discuss the process of preparing the Strategic Concept.

On 24 March, members of the Group of Experts will also discuss important issues of the preparation of NATO’s Strategic Concept with Lithuania’s Minister of National Defence Rasa Juknevičienė, chief foreign policy adviser to the President of Lithuania Darius Semaška, members of the Committee on Foreign Affairs and the Committee on National Security and Defence of the Seimas. The guests will also participate in the open round table discussion “Where Will the New NATO Strategic Concept Lead to?” at the Institute of International Relations and Political Science of Vilnius University.

In February, the group of twelve experts chaired by former Secretary of State of the U.S. Madeleine Albright, representatives from governmental and non-governmental organizations completed the stage of exchanging opinions. Currently, consultations of representatives from the Group of Experts are held in the capital cities of the NATO member states. After the consultations, the experts will issue a set of their recommendations to NATO’s Secretary-General. Taking into account the opinion of the experts, NATO’s Secretary-General would then develop the first draft of NATO’s Strategic Concept and would pass it on to the member countries to discuss it.

NATO’s Strategic Concept is the key document for the Alliance’s activities. The Strategic Concept outlines NATO’s purpose and its tasks, evaluates the strategic security environment and the perspective of changes, as well as provides guidelines for further adaptation of the Alliance’s military forces. At the Strasbourg-Kehl Summit in 2009, NATO leaders decided to prepare the new NATO’s Strategic Concept, which is expected to be adopted at the next summit meeting in autumn 2010. The current Strategic Concept was issued in 1999.