On Monday 22nd and Tuesday 23rd October, the Head of the NDC’s Research Division Dr Thierry Tardy joined a select group of high-level panellists to speak about European defence and NATO’s emerging security challenges. This was part of the Festival of Diplomacy, an important annual event in Rome providing a forum for subject-matter experts and institutional representatives to engage in broad-ranging discussions of security and defence issues.
The first seminar, hosted at the Chamber of Deputies in Rome, was entitled “Research and Development for a Common European Defence”. Participants included experts from think tanks and representatives of the Italian government, as well as a number of ambassadors and leaders of major Italian defence suppliers. Dr Tardy was part of the panel on Common Security and Defence Policy.
The following day, another important panel was convened at Villa Celimontana for a session entitled “NATO: collective defence and new challenges for security”. Dr Tardy’s contribution included the following thoughts: “The world is unstable, it produces a series of threats. International organizations, and amongst them NATO, are instruments that can regulate this unstable world, in the hands of member states who can tackle these threats by offering policy responses and instruments of security governance. I believe it is a mistake to think that states can do without International organizations’ regulation of the international system. […] NATO is an integral part of this system, which has been by and large successful in adapting to a new environment since the end of the Cold War. It has managed to reinvent itself by embracing new tasks through crisis management, as in the Balkans, and through the process of enlargement. Since 2014 and the Ukraine crisis, NATO has gone back to the basics of collective defence, and now faces the dual agenda of containing the Russian threat in the East and projecting stability in the South. In the meantime, NATO suffers from an internal crisis, with member states that diverge on their threat assessment and on how much they want to rely on NATO to address those threats. Will NATO manage to once again reinvent itself?”
Thierry Tardy, PhD, is the Head of the NDC Research Division. The Head of the Research Division is responsible for the planning, organization and execution of the NDC’s research and outreach programme. S/he represents the NDC in international fora, creates and maintains a network of connections with international institutions and the think tank world, and develops close relations with NATO Headquarters, NATO agencies and military commands.
NDC Public Affairs Office
(Prepared by Ms Ilaria Latorre, ITA C)
NATO Defense College