NATO Summit 2021 – From 2030 Agenda to the new Strategic Concept of the Alliance
Defence & Security

NATO Summit 2021 – From 2030 Agenda to the new Strategic Concept of the Alliance

By Riccardo Leoni
06.15.2021

One of the topics at the center of the NATO 2021 Summit was the Atlantic Alliance’s 2030 Agenda. Dating back to December 2019, at the London Summit, the mandate given to the Secretary General by the Heads of State and Heads of Government of NATO member countries aimed at drafting an agenda for the future of the Atlantic Alliance. The 2030 Agenda was thus conceived, also with the contribution of personalities and experts from outside NATO, to offer the Atlantic Alliance a solid conceptual basis on which to build the programme for the future of collective security and to respond effectively to the challenges of today and tomorrow.

The conclusion of the Brussels Summit officially kicked off the work on the new Strategic Concept, the document that will clearly outline the priorities, critical issues and objectives for the coming years, and that should be presented at the next Summit in Madrid in 2022. In order to understand what could be the direction of this document, it is possible to trace the general lines of the work and the process of reflection underway for several months by browsing through the 2030 Agenda, which represents in some way the political-conceptual compass for the drafting of the new Strategic Concept.

On a geopolitical level, NATO will be increasingly oriented towards a global posture, in order to counter the peer-to-peer threat posed by State actors such as Russia and China. According to the provisions of the 2030 Agenda, it will be crucial to strengthen NATO as a forum for political dialogue between the two sides of the Atlantic Ocean, as a platform for relaunching a world order based on shared rules among its Member States, and as a pivotal military instrument for the collective defence and security of the Euro-Atlantic area. It will also be very important to strengthen partnerships with democracies in the Indo-Pacific area, such as Australia, Japan, South Korea and Taiwan, with a view to containing Chinese influence. The 2030 Agenda also includes, for the first time, a section dedicated to critical security issues linked to climate change, which will aim both to mitigate the impact of military infrastructure on the climate and to adapt NATO’s operational capabilities in rapidly changing environmental scenarios, such as the Arctic. On the technological front, the focus will be on space and cyberspace: the next years will be dedicated also to increase NATO’s defensive, deterrence and resilience capabilities in these fields. The achievement of this goal will be central to the protection of critical infrastructures and democratic processes, which are now inextricably linked to the development of new technologies.

The Agenda 2030 thus embodies the internal reflection process currently underway within NATO through which the Atlantic Alliance seeks to prepare for the challenges of the future. From this point of view, the Brussels 2021 Summit is an important moment of passage, but it is certainly not the point of arrival. Stoltenberg, in fact, has declared that more concrete initiatives will be presented at the 2022 Summit in Madrid, where the new Strategic Concept will also be made official. The elaboration of the Alliance’s new strategic document, whose last version dates back to 2010, is the litmus test of the NATO renewal process, and it undoubtedly represents one of the most complex but also most important challenges for the future of the Atlantic Alliance.

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