Eduardo González
The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs and for Ibero-America and the Caribbean, Cristina Gallach, warned yesterday that NATO must define its “strategic purpose” in the face of threats coming from its southern flank, especially from the Sahel, and expressed, therefore, her wish that the next Summit of the Alliance, to be held in 2022 in Madrid, brings “a southern touch to the debates” that will contribute to finding “solutions and answers”.
“In Spain we know very well the threats coming from the southern flank, because of our geographical configuration as a country and as a member of the EU and NATO,” said Gallach during her speech at the telematic presentation of the report NATO and the South: a tale of three futures, prepared by the Elcano Royal Institute.
“The threats emerging from the south are different in nature from those of the east” because they contain elements of their own, such as “migration, the fragility of states and the conflicts in Libya, Israel and Palestine, Syria” and, above all, “the Sahel, a region that is the main source of instability for us”, she continued. Added to this is the growing presence of Russia and China in the region, which “contributes to making the security situation more complex”, she added.
Another problem in the area, Gallach warned, is “the great instability in the Gulf of Guinea“. “Our main objective must be that there should be no connection between the destabilizing forces in the Sahel and the destabilizing forces in the Gulf of Guinea”, she explained. “They are different forces, those in the Sahel are radical extremists linked to Al Qaeda or Daesh and in the Gulf of Guinea they have a more traditional character, such as piracy and threats to free navigation, but it is not in our interest that the two are connected through some countries in the Gulf of Guinea whose states are very fragile”, she added. Related to this problem, she warned, another major security challenge is the need to address the “total socio-economic development of the Sahel”, whose states have “very fragile internal institutions”.
In these circumstances, in Gallach’s view, the Atlantic Alliance faces two major challenges: defining its strategy in Africa and seeking alliances with other organizations, because “NATO does not necessarily have to be at the forefront” of solutions. “It must cooperate with important organizations and with other international actors” because “the presence on the ground of Alliance troops is not always a solution if there is no cybersecurity or intelligence information”. Apart from that, she continued, NATO must address its role in the face of “non-military” challenges when defining its “strategic perspective in the region”. “The fight against terrorism is military, of course”, but it must also “structure the Alliance’s role in underpinning socio-economic development or the dialogue processes in the Mediterranean that are already underway”, she said.
“There is a very clear message: Africa has fully entered NATO’s radar” and, therefore, “NATO will have to take it into account in its new approach to security threats”, an approach that is “coherent, that takes into account the different actors and that addresses the challenges from a global perspective in order to act accordingly”, she said. In this sense, she added, “the Madrid summit will bring a touch of the South to the debates, although I hope that it will not only bring that touch, but also solutions and answers”.
The report, which was also presented by Charles Powell, director of the Elcano Royal Institute; Luis Simón, director of the Brussels Office of the Elcano Royal Institute; and David van Weel, assistant secretary general of NATO’s Emerging Security Challenges Division, addresses the challenges facing the Alliance in its Southern Neighborhood and the security problems in the Middle East, North Africa and Sahel regions, given the growing presence of Russia and China in the area. It also recommends that NATO cooperate more with the EU, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), the African Union (AU) and other southern bodies and reiterates, in line with the NATO 2030 Report, the importance of a “consistent, clear and coherent” approach to the South.
