NATO Must Deter Russia to Secure Peace

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00:00Minister, what about with such a focus on defence spending, on military build-up,

00:05is there a bit of a sense that in the future it's going to be a world order

00:10where it's governed by who has the biggest stick?

00:13It's going to be hard power, that is the order of the day.

00:18You need to speak softly, but you need a stick.

00:21And it's better to have a big stick than a small stick.

00:24So I think that, yeah, it will be also hard power.

00:27Europe has a tradition of soft power, diplomacy, trade, but we need hard power as well.

00:33We see that the world is not a nice place.

00:36It's a hard place, and it's not getting better, it's getting worse.

00:40So, yeah, absolutely.

00:41Is Europe on a war footing, sir?

00:44No, we want peace.

00:45We want to preserve peace, and that's why we have NATO,

00:48it's the strongest military alliance in history.

00:50So we need to have peace.

00:52We want to secure peace, and we need to secure peace by deterrence.

00:57And be it deterrent for Russia, the Russian aggression that we see every day in Ukraine,

01:02we only can hold them back when we're strong by ourselves.

01:06The joint declaration, though, seemed to admit a direct reference to Russian aggression.

01:10Was that disappointing to you?

01:12Do you consider it a softened declaration?

01:15Well, for me, everybody knows what we're talking about,

01:17so that's not an issue.

01:19There's no discussion about that.

01:20It is about Russian threat, it's about Chinese military build-up,

01:24it's about Iran, it's about North Korea fighting with the Russians,

01:30so, you know, that's very clear, there's no discussion about that.