Nordic-Baltic Eight

So Europe doesn't have this sort of centralized, you know, ability to, and there's no quarterback.

So I think all of these initiatives are good, right? So the Nordic Baltic cooperation under sea, fantastic focus on infrastructure, paying attention to hybrid, to threats on critical infrastructure.

And I'm sure there's a lot more intelligence sharing happening between Europeans than we have previously seen.

So that if you, you know, looked under the hood, you'd be like, and you knew what you were looking for compared to 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago, you'd be like, wow.

So public support for NATO is still at an all-time high, which is about 77-78% of the Swedish population support NATO membership, and six out of eight parties support NATO membership, and we're becoming two years into our journey as a full-fledged ally.

People see the importance for our NATO membership in enabling not at least a stronger Nordic and Nordic Baltic cooperation, and that's really been blossoming during these last two years.

As far as NATO as an alliance goes, significant steps were taken in 2021 with NATO's new force model, and also in 2022 with NATO's new defence plan.

So I think we're all as allies now laser focused on making sure that these new defence plans are executable and that we can ensure that we can deter and defend every inch of allied territory.

So civil society is very much involved in the military life and in the thinking and You can build the drones in the morning and then you can run an NGO in the afternoon.

And it really aligns to me with this whole of society approach that especially the Nordic Baltic aid is really increasingly looking into saying that the security and defense, it cannot only rely on military.

There has to be a civil society who's also contributing to the government.

So it has to be this triangle that if one is failing the other one can step in and and kind of push it in so the military is not its own separate unit that now all of a sudden dictates the rules but it stays in constant exchange with civil society and in dialogue you know understanding what the needs are what the trends are where you know it's so they can um you know watch each other, keep an eye on each other.

Which brings us to our central question.

Are the NBA becoming a durable center of European security leadership? Or will EU bureaucracy and internal division cap how far wartime urgency can carry them?

This is Global Insights by Network 2020.

So we have three terrific guests today to help us answer this question.

Heisky, I'd like to start with you.

We're fresh off a few big events, including the NATO summit in Ankara last month, where President Trump again spoke of withdrawing U.S. troops from Europe alongside his continued interest in claiming Greenland.

I also just mentioned the NBA summit in Ukraine that resulted in helpful but not necessarily transformative aid given U.S. gaps.

So...