Sonntag, 20. Mai 2012

NATO After Afghanistan - A View from Europe


 

 

 

 

 

ON THE SUMMITS: PERSPECTIVES FROM GLOBAL LEADERS

NATO AFTER AFGHANISTAN – A VIEW FROM EUROPE

His Excellency Radosław Sikorski, Minister of Foreign Affairs, Republic of Poland

Over the last two decades, NATO has attempted to redefine itself to become a more flexible and dynamic military alliance. Since joining in 1999, Poland has played a critical role in NATO with regard to enlargement, missile defense, and global operations, including maintaining a current deployment of approximately 2,500 troops in Afghanistan. The conflict in Afghanistan, meanwhile, has proven to be an important milestone in the organization’s evolution. With NATO transitioning its Afghanistan operations and the United States pivoting its strategic focus from the European continent to Asia, what is next for the NATO alliance? Please join The Chicago Council on Global Affairs with His Excellency Radosław Sikorski for a discussion on NATO after Afghanistan.

His Excellency Radosław Sikorski was sworn in as minister of Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Poland in 2007. Since 2010, he has served as vice chairman of the Civic Platform party and chairman of the Committee on European Affairs. In 2007, he was elected to the Lower House of the Polish Parliament. Sikorski was elected senator for Bydgoszcz in 2005, and served as minister of National Defense from 2005 to 2007.  From 2002 to 2005 he was a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C. and executive director of the New Atlantic Initiative. He appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Foreign Affairs as an expert on Atlantic issues. As Deputy Minister of National Defense in 1992, Sikorski initiated Poland’s NATO entry ambitions. He was a war correspondent in Afghanistan and Angola from 1986 to 1989, and he won the World Press Photo award in 1987 for a photograph taken in Afghanistan. Sikorski headed the students’ strike committee during the unrest in Bydgoszcz in March 1981, and was granted political asylum in Great Britain from 1982 to 1989.  He holds a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Oxford.

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