Senate Nato Observer Group

Floor Speech

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Mr. SCHUMER. Mr. President, today I am pleased to join my colleague the Republican leader in reestablishing the Senate NATO Observer Group. In the late 1940s, under the stewardship of President Harry Truman, the United States led our Western allies in the creation of an unprecedented arrangement to provide for our collective defense. Since then, NATO has guaranteed the security of our European allies and has come to our aid, protecting the United States in its darkest hours following the 9/11 attacks. Today, new threats are emerging from Russia and along NATO's southern border, making the alliance more necessary than ever. It is the responsibility of the Senate to be kept abreast of any and all factors affecting such a key component of our national defense.

The Senate NATO Observer group was first established in 1997 and oversaw the enlargement of our alliance to countries recently freed from Soviet domination in Eastern Europe. Following the reestablishment of the group in 2002 by Majority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Minority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, the Senate NATO Observer group had an oversight role during the NATO mission in Afghanistan-- again, the only time a NATO member has invoked the right to collective self-defense.

Unfortunately, since talks of further enlargement of the alliance expired 10 years ago, the Senate Observer Group lapsed. Since that time, Russia has reasserted itself in Eastern Europe through the aggressive use of hybrid warfare, including cyber infiltration of our allies' political infrastructure, as well as our own. While Georgia considered eventual NATO membership, Russia invaded and occupied South Ossetia and Abkhazia, regions which remain in Russian hands today. A similar fate befell Ukraine in 2014, when Russia's ``little green men'' were inserted into a civil conflict that spilled over into a civil war in which thousands of people died.

As we learned during the 2016 Presidential election, the Kremlin's aggressive posture extends far beyond Russia's borders. American intelligence agencies have shown conclusively that Russia has interfered in elections at home and abroad using a sophisticated array of cyber attacks and disinformation to undermine confidence in the American political process and in Western democracy writ large. Neither the United States nor our NATO allies are immune from such attacks. That is why it is imperative that we continue to invest in and strengthen that alliance. Moreover, it is why the U.S. Senate must be actively involved in ensuring that our most important alliance remains alert to the serious issues before us.

There are several pressing issues on which the observer group will immediately begin work on. NATO recently established a naval command for the Atlantic, dedicated to ensuring the freedom of the seas, a policy the United States has steadfastly upheld since the early days of the republic. In addition to an increased focus on protecting the sea lanes between Europe and North America, a new NATO logistics command and a cyber operations center are being formed in response to the continued aggressive posture of Russian forces along NATO's eastern border. Cyber defense in particular should be of acute interest to Senators in this group. Russian cyber attacks have damaged countries around the world and continue to threaten critical infrastructure in the United States. I look forward to learning how NATO will integrate each nation's cyber defense knowledge into its own and how we might learn from our allies about how best to protect ourselves from cyber warfare.

This Congress began with a unanimous vote reaffirming the United States' commitment to article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty. There can be no doubt that the Senate remains firmly committed to transatlantic security and to countering the malign influence of a hostile Kremlin at home and abroad. The opportunity to learn from our allies and prepare for the future is too important. So I am glad that my colleagues Senators Shaheen and Tillis have spearheaded the reestablishment of the NATO Observer Group, on which they will serve as cochairs.

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