NATO Alliance Quotes

In 2003, at the time I made my "Old Europe" comment, the center of gravity in NATO and Europe had long since shifted to the East. With the former Warsaw Pact countries joining NATO, the alliance has a different mix today. Some people were sensitive about my comment because they thought it was a pejorative way of highlighting demographic realities. Apparently they felt it pointed a white light at a weakness in Europe - an aging population. Europe has come some distance since World War II in becoming Europe.

The United States, obviously, has a great interest in helping to maintain peace and security in Europe, and we have a formal alliance, NATO, to do so.

We are deploying battle groups, battalions, which we consider necessary to convey a message of deterrence, credible deterrence, that if one NATO ally is attacked, it will trigger a whole response from the whole alliance.

The Hungarian people voted for NATO membership. We are active in the joint actions of NATO.

I don't think Russia could start a war by attacking any of the NATO member states.

I believe that if we think back to the period from F.D.R. through, let us say, Bush I, until the end of the Cold War, we lived through an artificial period in which American interests and European interests essentially dovetailed.

I want significant parts of Nato infrastructure, important for the alliance, to be placed in the central Europe.

I have no doubt that the U.S., even under Trump, will stick to the mutual defense commitment in the NATO treaty in the event of an emergency. Trump described NATO as being obsolete during his election campaign, but he made clear afterward that he considers the alliance to be an indispensable necessity.

For me it is completely clear that our air bases in Germany would be available to the Americans.

Nato is supposed to be here to protect the alliance... If Poland and other central European countries constitute the real flank of Nato, then it seems natural to me, a logical conclusion, that bases should be placed in those countries.

To those who would criticize our tough stance, I would point out that the United States has demonstrated not merely with words but with its actions that we stand firmly behind Article 5, the mutual defense commitment.

America is the one that has led the effort to strengthen NATO and strengthen the front-line states against Russia's pressures.

NATO is an alliance, so all parts of the alliance have to be capable.

To his lasting credit, President Reagan never wavered. He recognized the strategic importance of staying the course, both in terms of denying Moscow the military hegemony it sought in Western Europe and of restoring the will, cohesiveness, and security of the NATO alliance, so badly frayed during the turbulent 1970s.

You know, NATO as a military alliance has something called Article 5, and basically it says this: An attack on one is an attack on all. And you know the only time it's ever been invoked? After 9/11, when the 28 nations of NATO said that they would go to Afghanistan with us to fight terrorism, something that they still are doing by our side.

Germany is one of the medium powers of the world. It is a non-nuclear power. It is in a lower class than the United States, the Soviet Union, France, the United Kingdom and others.

Most Americans will be horrified that President Obama is compromising our deterrent to chemical and biological attacks on this country. Our allies will also be troubled by his aspiration to eliminate U.S. tactical nuclear weapons in Europe.

I don't understand what the president's [Donald Trump] position is on Russia. But I can tell you what my position is on Russia: Russia is a great danger to a lot of its neighbors, and [Vladimir] Putin has as one of his core objectives fracturing NATO, which is one of the greatest military alliances in the history of the world.

In my experience, in bringing coercive diplomacy to bear against Slobodan Milosevic, no bomb strike was more important than maintaining NATO's cohesion.

I want to reassure our NATO allies that if any of them get attacked, we'll be there to defend them.

Why should this war in the West be fought for the restoration of Poland? The Poland of the Versailles Treaty will never rise again.

President Trump is hardly the first U.S. president to call on the European allies to do more - in one form or another, every president since Harry Truman has done so. What is different this time, however, is Trump's suggestion that America's commitment to the alliance is conditional.

We're committed to NATO. From the conversations I've already had with President [Donald] Trump over the phone, he has shown to me his commitment to NATO as well.

I don't believe Russia would attack a NATO country or NATO as such, no matter which country we are talking about.

Can the wider West establish a global 'cyber NATO?' It would be difficult, but so, too, was the founding of NATO itself, which was called into being only after successive communist coups in Eastern Europe.