Upon his arrival at the Madrid Summit held at Ifema, the Secretary General of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, pointed out that the Alliance is preparing to make a decisive announcement regarding the South flank and terrorism, one of the issues on which that the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, and the King, made more of an impact during their speeches yesterday in the framework of the meeting.
As ABC already announced last June, this announcement will be related to Mauritania, an African country with which the Alliance intends to deepen its collaboration, an issue that will be discussed during the meeting of heads of state and government. This 360-degree prism -which not only attends to the threats on the eastern flank- is one of the demands of Spain.
With a size twice that of Spain and only 4.6 million inhabitants, Mauritania shares a 2,237-kilometre border with Mali, one of the hotbeds of jihadist instability and of Russia’s new presence in the region. The Atlantic Alliance recalls that Mauritania has already participated in five security and defense initiatives with NATO since 2011.
Stoltenberg has also stressed that the summit is going to be “historic”, pointing out that it is being held “in the most serious security crisis that we have faced since WWII”. The Norwegian has reaffirmed that the Alliance is going to face “all the threats” that it faces in a unified manner, stressing that “it is going to be a historic summit” in which it is going to “approve a new strategic concept”. “We are going to express our support for Ukraine,” he reiterated.
The secretary general, who considered that “China poses a challenge to our values and ideas”, stressed that the world has changed a lot since 2010, when the previous NATO strategic concept was approved, at a time when relations with Russia they had not reached the degree of deterioration, and, in short, rupture, in which they find themselves right now.
“The leaders are going to make a historic decision, inviting Sweden and Finland to become members of NATO,” he added, referring to the historic agreement reached yesterday with Turkey, which allows the negotiations to be unblocked so that the two Nordic countries join The alliance.
