Paris, 3 December 2000 – Günther Altenburg, NATO Assistant Secretary-General for Political Affairs, denied that defence cooperation was breaking down between the United States and its allies.

Addressing the WEU Assembly on Tuesday, he said that solid North America-EU ties “are a missing piece of the [defence relations] puzzle, but that it was a “myth that the US and its allies are no longer willing nor able to co-operate” in the military field. The strategic benefits of “closer cooperation, a broader set of instruments and a fairer division of labour are too important to be left in limbo,” declared Mr Altenburg, who was standing in for NATO Secretary-General Lord Robertson.

The NATO Summit in Prague in November showed that “we can quite simply say ‘no’” to the idea that the United States had opted for a unilateral approach to defence, even though it had revised its strategic concept, as always, when a new US President takes office. “We hope that questions such as the availability of NATO resources to the EU under the Berlin Plus [arrangement] will be resolved quite soon, and that the Secretary-Generals' plan will succeed,” he said. “If not, we will have serious difficulties of cooperation in the future," he warned.

Mr Altenburg reaffirmed that NATO was carrying out a feasibility study on theatre missile defence, and that discussions with Russia on the issue had accelerated since the Rome NATO Summit earlier this year. The Russians were “interested in selling their hardware, and also in seeing where there are possibilities for common missile defence.” He added that it was important for the United States to relax its weapons export controls if Europe was to build up its defence capabilities, because the US was so far ahead in its technological expertise.

Asked who would make decisions in an enlarged NATO, Mr. Altenburg said “no-one wants to change the Washington Treaty” whereby the North Atlantic Council has the final say.