The agenda for the next NATO Summit, set for September 2014, in Wales, topped the agenda for the two-day Meeting of NATO Foreign Ministers in Brussels, in which Deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister Evangelos Venizelos is participating.
In his interventions, Mr. Venizelos referred to the three main priorities of NATO partnerships, substantial utilization of the Alliance’s capabilities, and the new form of NATO’s presence in Afghanistan.
There was a discussion of NATO’s partnerships, which Mr. Venizelos, in his second intervention, characterized as the Alliance’s most important strategic advantage at this time, pointing out that the Alliance needs to utilize these partnerships to the greatest possible extent.
Mr. Venizelos stressed that this means every kind of partnership, from Partnerships for Peace, which concern mainly the European space, to the Mediterranean Dialogue, the Istanbul initiative, which concerns the Gulf Countries, and every other partnership configuration that NATO must confront with flexibility, making optimum use of the capabilities that can be offered by each country participating in these partnerships.
The third item on the agenda – during Tuesday’s working dinner – was NATO’s Open Door policy. Greece’s positions on the Open Door policy, particularly with regard to the prerequisites for FYROM’s accession to NATO, are absolutely clear and are linked to the more general criteria of NATO, and not to Greek-FYROM bilateral relations.
The first item on the agenda for the second day of the Meeting is the NATO-Russia Council, with the participation of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, who recently visited Greece and met with Mr. Venizelos. During the Venizelos-Lavrov meeting in Athens, the Greek Foreign Minister underscored that both the EU-Russia relationship and the NATO-Russia relationship are of vital importance and, in reality, impact a number of very important fields, including the EU’s Eastern Neighbourhood Policy and NATO’s Open Door Policy and Partnerships.
The agenda for tomorrow’s session also includes a meeting of NATO with partners participating in the ISAF mission, and there will also be a meeting of the NATO-Georgia Commission, ahead of which Mr. Venizelos and his Georgian counterpart signed a Memorandum of Cooperation between the Greek and Georgian Foreign Ministries on the provision of assistance in bringing Georgia closer to the EU.
Also on the margins of the NATO Ministerial, Mr. Venizelos met with his Spanish counterpart, José Manuel García-Margallo, with whom he carried out a review of issues of common interest within the EU and NATO.
December 3, 2013