Andrew Monaghan, Research Advisor, Research Division, NATO Defense College

First of all, Ladies and Gentlemen, I would like to thank the organizers for the kind invitation. The third time I have the pleasure of speaking in Ukraine about energy security. The other two occasions have been in February, when we also had to discuss NATO-Russia relations.

I am pleased to say that I actually agree with much of words that have been said today. Given that this is the penal on national strategies and regional synergies, first of all I think that the key point is that we have to resolve our internal problems before we start blaming other people. What is being very short of recently – are national strategies in consumer states. What is a strategy? Well, a strategy is who is going to achieve what with what resources and timeframe. This is far too lacking in the counter thinking. If we reconsider our positions particularly with growth to efficiency of infrastructure, this changes the external horizon. This changes the dialogue with our partners with transit states and producer states. I think it is worth reminding that point that we have heard also from John Roberts - the notion of producer, consumer and transit state is also misleading. In fact, every state can start thinking at least in two of these roles, if not all three. We have to try to consider those terms that major producers are also major transit states, are also producers and consumers themselves. This has a fundamental impact on our relations with them. If producer states run short of gas because they cannot consume efficiently or produce enough, we also have problems. We need to share technology in this respect.

I will have a couple of notes to make about NATO, because I think it changes the original synergy we focus on. I am pleased to say in a shock, perhaps, that two people from the same international organization actually agree with each other. NATO does have a limited complimentary role. There is a major benefit and we can be more specific, however, NATO is a Trans-Atlantic organization, and therefore we are bringing by discussing energy in NATO, the United States, major producer, consumer and transit state, Canada, major producer, consumer and transit state, also Norway and Turkey into the European discussions. These are just the member states. This already changes the focus and demonstrates a strategic horizon. Furthermore, of course, NATO has much more advanced partnerships in other parts of the world that the EU lacks. Here I’m particularly thinking, of course, about the Mediterranean dialogue, the Istanbul cooperation, NATO-Russia Council, and, of course, Ukraine. This also means relations with states in South Caucasus and Central Asia. We already began to move to a global strategic horizon for energy discussions. This is important, because effectively energy policy is cross-national, cross-regional, and most importantly, is interregional.

If we are going to talk of diversification, - diversification is a nice handy word for people to use and they like to use “we must diversify”, - full stop, and a new paragraph. The problem is how does this benefit? Where does it benefit? Who does this benefit? In many cases the call to diversify is not backed up with significant enough relations with the states to whom we intend to diversify. However difficult the relations are with other states in this partnership, this is always a dialogue. We have to engage, we cannot simply discuss energy without Russia or without Saudi Arabia for instance. We have to engage with all of them for a strategic horizon. And at that note I would like to say about one final problem returning to national strategies within the European Union. Effectively the problem in energy security is – what threat and to whom. Because everyone is relatively diverse - some people have greater dependence on certain states, while the others have different energy consumption. This is a fundamental difficulty in creating an energy security strategy. So, again we have full circle to national strategies. Thank you very much for your attention.

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