 Mae'r pwysig yn y cyhoeddfyrdd. Mae'r proses oherwydd y cyhoeddfyrdd wedi cyhoeddfyrdd y maen nhw, y gweithio, y gweithio, y gweithio a'r ffocws y dyfodol o gweithgafol. Yr hyn o'r cyhoedd yn gwybod y cyhoeddfyrdd ymlaen yn ddorffent anhygwm arall. Yn Dr Bysgol, mae'r Cymru i'r gwaith ymlaen, mae'r cyhoeddfyrdd y Llyfr ond mae'r cyhoeddfyrdd wedi'u cyhoeddfyrdd. Has been a Member of Parliament for approximately 20 years. Has a background in economic research, and in the last number of years has then become the Secretary of State for Defence. Thank you so much Mrs Minan-Ladryd. It's a pleasure for me to be here. You mentioned some of the things I've done in the last 50 years. Mae'r unrhyw gwaith yw'r athgwrs yn y llwyffwyr hwnnw, yn y cwmhwyll gwrs yn ymdweithio'r ysgol yng Nghaerfodill, yn y nôl yn 1986. Yn mynd yn ei chael y ffordd hwnnw ychydig yw'r amser sy'n ei ddweud y cwmhwyllion a'r ysgol yng Nghaerfodill. answered, when I went to school I understood it was an issue of Catholics and Protestants. When I went to Belfast and talked to some Catholic clargimean, they told me this was not about being Catholic or Protestant but about feeling irish or british, which would not be exactly the same anyway. This is something that I'm interested in and when we went here with the Excellency, the ambassador, a we already talked about Brexit, and it was not a surprise for me to get to know that this is a question that is of utmost importance for this country. Let me just make one remark, one personal remark at the beginning, because when I changed with the Minister from the Labour Ministry to the Defence Ministry, I was told that from now on I should stick more to what has been written down for me because it is riskier to insult representatives from other countries than to insult trade unionists or employers or officials. So I should not run too many risks, but let me say something that I regard as very important and this is to keep the western world together in these days. And you are aware that we belong both to NATO and European Union. I'm aware that you're a EU member country, not too far away from Germany. I mean, it's almost the same time to go to Dublin than to go to Parliament of Mallorca. There are more Germans who go to Parliament of Mallorca than to Dublin as you know, but it is not too far away, but if we are here, we are a bit further from the problems that we face in Central Europe with regard to the so-called Islamic State or Daish on the one hand and what happened in Ukraine on the other hand, but what I regard as most important is to keep the two alliances together. It is my impression that in these days it is not so important whether you belong to the one, to the other organization or to both. I was very impressed when I visited our soldiers in the EU training mission Somalia and Mogadishu and I met soldiers from Serbia, a non-NATO, a non-EU Member State, but united with us in the fight against terrorism, or at least in educating, correctly speaking, not to fight against terrorism, so I should not use that, but in educating and training soldiers from Somalia to fight against Islamist terrorism. So we were united there and we cooperate with many non-EU, non-NATO countries also in Afghanistan, so this is something that seems to be of utmost importance from my point of view that we keep these 34 countries. If you take NATO and EU together to keep these 34 together and we will remain 34 also after Brexit because the UK as you know will remain in NATO and with regard to Montenegro we are going to be 35 in a foreseeable time and I found it impressive to hear for example in Norway that they told me we were affected by Russian counter sanctions against EU sanctions before we Norwegians had the time to decide that we would follow the EU sanctions. So this is obviously also from the Russian side a clear indication that they also see that we belong together and this is one of the successes that we have reached as Western world in the recent years that should not be underestimated. This is my personal conviction and now I stop running risks and will stick to what has been written down for me by my experts. So I think I can leave out the things I've already expressed them and I can continue by saying having said that what I said before that in these dynamic and complex time security and defence policy is something that concerns us all. More than ever before security and defence policy is a transnational matter not only when it comes to the challenges we face but even more so when it comes to addressing them. It's therefore all the more important to keep talking to each other and keep the discussion going but also to seek solutions and inspiration. We are all well aware that there is a multitude of challenges waiting for us in the future but especially in the year 2016. Now we are already looking back on a year with too many wars and too many crises. It instantly brings to mind images of war, of terrorist attacks and of natural disasters. Much of what moved us in the year 2016 is still topical today and I think we should. I'll try to do it differently. My clear word has changed from our central European perspective starting in the year 2014 that was on the one hand the fact that for the first time for decades with the illegal annexation of Crimea there was the violent change of borders inside Europe. This was something that was not experienced for decades and which was not foreseen by us. And of course there is no doubt that what happens in eastern Ukraine is influenced by Russia also. This is something that we have to take into account when we talk to our American friends. I do not talk about the new government now. This is still at least to some extent difficult to foresee what will be new emphasis of this government. We are quite satisfied about the signs of continuity that we see with regard to this government. This is a discussion that we had in recent years also that whenever there was military support for the Ukraine government it was obvious that there was a counteraction on the other side and it was quite clear where it came from. That's why we used to say that there is no military solution for the conflict in Ukraine. It does not fall under article 5 and it says clear consequences. If you want to be credible with regard to the Baltic states concerning article 5, it means there must be a distinction between those countries which belong to NATO and those who do not belong to it. The other great challenge that we saw were the atrocities committed by Daesh, Islamic status we used to say in German, which was something like the focus of an Islamist terrorist crisis belt that started geographically in the west of Africa, Mali and neighboring countries. Going over to Libya, which is something like a failed state in this time of history. Continuing the Horn of Africa, Somalia, where we have been engaged with our military for a long time. Continuing Syria and Iraq and going until Afghanistan. So we are confronted with rising problems in this crisis belt and these two tendencies have come together in 2014. That brought us to some changes in our foreign insecurity policy. What you should bear in mind is when we had reunification in Germany in 1990, this was also a unification of two armed forces. Just to give you an idea of the figures, west Germany to east Germany according to population was something like 4 to 1 at that time. The western armed forces consisted of 495,000 soldiers at that time. All male, none of them ever been abroad for being part of a mission as we are involved in today. So the thing that expressed the change was for example what happened in Cambodia. You are aware of the atrocities committed by the communist government in the 1970s when they killed some 20% of the whole population within 4 years. But there was no chance to solve this problem for the western world and so it was the communist Vietnam that intervened at that time. In the early 1990s when Cambodia still suffered from what happened in the 70s, but the situation was of course much better than in the 70s. There was the chance for the German armed forces to be part of a peacekeeping mission in Cambodia. So that was a clear indication of the change that we had gone through. So in 1990 the German armed forces of west Germany consisted of almost half a million soldiers. And the east German armed forces were smaller but much bigger with regard to the population. And so what we agreed upon in the so-called 2 plus 4 agreement at that time with the victorious powers. I don't know the English term for we say Siegermechte, victorious powers. Well the Allied forces. So the US, UK, France and the Soviet Union at that time. So we agreed upon reducing our German armed forces down to 370,000. This was the agreement in international law that we signed in 1990. And until now we have reduced our armed forces down to 185,000. So exactly half of the amount that we agreed upon according to international law is the consequence of sovereign national decisions taking in 25 years time roughly speaking from 1990 onwards. And this was summarized under the phrase of the peace dividend that we were happy to realize in Germany. Peace dividend meant we were surrounded only by friends and there was no reason to be afraid in Europe. We clearly focused on our international missions with regard to the equipment and with regard to what our soldiers were equipped with. So the procurement was clearly focused. The procurement of the German armed forces was clearly focused on what was needed in the missions in Afghanistan, Kosovo, in Africa and elsewhere. And in the meantime there is a clear commitment and more or less common sense in the German defence policy that we have to do more for our defence. We will not go back to the figures, to the numbers that we disposed of in former decades, but it is clear that we have to be more flexible than we have been in the past. And the investments that we have increased are clearly focused on our capacities to defend our own country and to defend our friends and allies in the alliances that we belong to. So we will stick to our international obligations and of course they are not so easily foreseeable. I mean, before 9-11 no one expected us to go to Afghanistan, for example, and no one knows what will really happen in the years to come. But our basic commitment is that we will stick to the obligations that we have agreed upon. But the focus of what we invest more is for personnel and for procurement in our own country to defend our country and to defend our allies. So this is the consequence of what has happened in Ukraine, what has happened in Europe and what we see with regard to international terrorism. And you've already mentioned, we do not yet know what was the cause of the attack that hit the Dortmund football team last night. We are not yet sure, but Germany, like many other western countries, has been hit by international terrorism. We have seen that during the Christmas market in Berlin last year and there were some other incidents in last summer. So we are aware that we are in the focus of terrorism like other countries also. So it is in our interest and certainly in our common interest that we have to engage more in preventing countries from becoming failed states, from being overwhelmed by terrorist groups to stabilize these countries in a different neighborhood under different circumstances, especially in Africa. That's what we are committed to and what we have also learned in the past is that the enemy of our enemy is not necessarily our friend. There is a good reason for Germans to say so because even I can remember in the 80s when there was the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, there were some of the so-called Mujahideen who were presented on German TV and I say so as a member of the Christian Democratic Party, which is regarded as a more conservative party in Germany and we were strongly against the Soviet Union. But it was also our mistake to think that these Mujahideen people that they were our friends because like us they were strongly against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. And this was a mistake that we had to realize later and that cost us some casualties. We have had 55 German soldiers who went to Afghanistan after 9-11 who didn't come back alive. And many of them were killed under circumstances that we would normally call a war. And they were the victims of people whom we regarded as our friends in former times when they were against the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan. So one of the consequences we drew out of that was in Iraq we have come to terms more or less with the central Iraqi government which helps us in supporting the Peshmerga, the Kurdish Peshmerga in Northern Iraq. This is not in the back of the Iraqi government but under their auspices and with their consent. And on the other hand one of the difficulties in the situation in Syria is that someone who has attacked his own people by means of weapons of mass destruction does not become our friend simply because Daesh claims him their enemy. And so that's why we do not see a political solution for Syria with this president of Syria that is still in power. So this is one of the consequences taken out of this experience that the enemy of our enemy is not our friend. And so to sum this up there were many decades when Germany was not very much involved in military actions as were in the world for good reasons. We had to realize that our partners did not come to us and say you have caused so many crimes in World War II so we expect you to be reluctant and to be in a reserved position but the obvious, the contrary was the case. People demanded us to stick to our humanitarian obligations and not to hide behind our own history. So Germans will never be in the front on their own and say we want to do more. But as a consequence of our history we do not deny our humanitarian international responsibility. And that's why there is an agreement in government and parliament for the years to come for the foreseeable time to invest more in our armed forces and especially to dedicate most of what we invest to our alliances. Well I learnt that you are not very much interested in NATO here in Ireland and so that you are not very much involved in the 2% debate that we have in NATO but what I should like to express here is we stick to our obligations, we are willing to do more and we dedicate almost all our military investments to NATO and European Union. We have national caveats like countries with nuclear capacities, we don't dispose of these capacities as you know and whatever we can do militarily, almost everything that we can do militarily is dedicated to the alliances we are involved in and this will be more in the years to come, this is the consequence of the situation that we have to be aware of in Europe and in our neighbouring continent so to speak. And therefore again it is our strong conviction that these two alliances must cooperate, that they must work together. If you take all the countries together we spend some 200 billion euros for defence which is an impressively high sum of money and with the same amount of money apart from the fact that we are willing as I said to invest more but with this impressive sum of money we could be much more effective and much more efficient and therefore it's our conviction that the European Union must become more effective, that NATO must become more effective and that the interrelations between both of them must become better so in contrast to some suspicions that we were confronted with by our friends from the UK we have never had the idea and the ambition to create double structures why should we be in favour of duplication structures but we want the one organisation to cooperate with the other and that the capabilities add to each other to make the whole western world more effective and more capable with regard to military capabilities and these are some ideas that we have also laid down in our white paper published in 2016 and I learned that we have some of these white papers here that were also published in English and what you should know with regard to such a white paper in contrast to some other countries there is no legal obligation for the German government to publish a white paper although there are some countries who publish a white paper in every parliamentary period we are not forced to do so, the last one we published was in 2006 and when this government was formed in the late autumn of 2013 there was no plan to write such a white paper because we didn't see a fundamental change in the security environment of 2013 compared to 2016 and the occasions that I mentioned in 2014 and what followed out of it these were the reasons why the government and the vast majority in power came to the idea to agree upon a new white paper as a reaction on the changes in the security environment that we are confronted with which implies that on a narrow scale we are still only surrounded by friends but we have to be aware of the fact that dangers have come closer to us first of all they have come closer and so far that we had a violent change of borders in Europe and that some things in Africa and Asia have become more complicated more challenging, more threatening also to make that very clear and apart from that in a globalised economy and society things are getting closer anyway and so these were the reasons why we have agreed upon this new white paper in 2016 with the consequences that I mentioned I could add a lot so we have some focus on other new developments for example cyber, we have just installed a new cyber command in the German Armed Forces because we see that hybrid warfare belongs to the new developments that we are confronted with an experienced foreign politician who does not belong to my party once told me that Russian propaganda hasn't changed very much in last decades in principle, said the difference was in the 1980s people in the Soviet Union were aware that what was written in Prafda was not the truth I learnt that Prafda is the Russian word for truth and there was an awareness that people were not told the truth today they are still not told the truth but the awareness has gone to some extent and there are new technical means of spreading propaganda around the world that did not exist in communist times and so we have to be aware of that and we were confronted, we still are confronted with fake news about a rape of a Russian-German girl in Berlin about similar crimes committed by our troops in Lithuania and some other kinds of hybrid warfare in Soviet times we could be convinced that the Soviet Union would never use energy as a weapon because they were so dependent on Western currency that whatever happened they were a liable with regard to the flow of energy this is different under Putin as we see because for the oligarchs there is still a lot of money to get even if they use energy as a weapon so there are with regard to hybrid warfare, with regard to propaganda, with regard to cyber attacks there are some new challenges that we also have to face and we try to adapt our armed forces, also our ministry to these new kinds of challenges but at the end it is our strong conviction that we are not just a military alliance both EU and NATO that we are a community of values and that these values count and that these values will prevail although they are challenged, although they are threatened and that's why it is good to be part of such a strong alliance and that's why it is good that Ireland also belongs to this community of values and to this common security and defence policy that we have agreed upon in the European Union and to finish with that as I mentioned the minister and I we served in the same positions in the Labour ministry in the last period we had a liberal coalition partner at that time and they were not so interested in labour and social affairs so we took over there so when we formed the grand coalition government with the social democrats for what sort of reasons social democrats insisted on going into the Labour ministry so we had to leave and we went to defence so what I learned and what was the difference sometimes when we had to go to Brussels in the Labour ministry and justify why we had agreed upon some old age pension reforms which we completely financed by that of our own funds we never asked Brussels for any penny or for any cent from a Brussels fund to finance our old age pension system anyway they wanted to know everything in detail why we did so sometimes we asked ourselves what did that have to do with subsidiarity but when we changed the defence it became very clear for us how necessary the European Union is because none of the EU member states can play a role in security and defence affairs without the others and that's why this European pillar of NATO and the European common security and defence policy in the European Union as such is of utmost importance for our security and therefore it's good to be here among friends thank you so much