Today's D Brief: NATO's Stoltenberg on the Hill; Changing views of China; Russia's new hypersonic test; And a bit more.
By Ben Watson and Jennifer Hlad
October 5, 2021 11:06 AM ET
The D Brief
NATO in DC, day two. NATO’s Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg will meet with U.S. lawmakers today on Capitol Hill, and he’ll drop by Georgetown University’s campus for an event hosted by the Brookings Institution at 12 p.m. ET.
Day one: Stoltenberg dropped by 1600 Pennsylvania for an in-person visit with President Biden on Monday, their second such meeting since June when Biden visited Brussels. According to the White House, the two men on Monday discussed “Transatlantic defense,” “strategic competitors,” “transnational threats,” and “developing a new Strategic Concept.” (The last such concept was designed in 2010, and listed “three essential core tasks” for the alliance—quite focused at the time on Iraq and Afghanistan while America’s financial crisis reverberated around the world—which NATO listed as “collective defence, crisis management, and cooperative security.”)
Comparatively speaking, NATO’s readout went into more detail about the topic of Afghanistan, with Stoltenberg’s office noting “that Allies had taken the decision to leave together after many rounds of consultations,” and that Stoltenberg himself “stressed the mission had not been in vain, as for 20 years, no terrorist attacks have been launched on our countries from Afghanistan...He [also] concluded that the difficult decision on Afghanistan does not change the need for Europe and North America to stand together in NATO.” Read more here, or register for today’s event with Brookings, here.
https://www.defenseone.com/threats/2021/10/the-d-brief-october-05-2021/185854/
