Episode 6: Sorin Ducaru, NATO's man with many helmets

Channeling Brussels

Joining Teri this week is NATO Assistant Secretary General for Emerging Security Challenges, Sorin Ducaru. Just from his title you can tell Ambassador Ducaru has his hands more than full. With the threat landscape against the alliance changing constantly in unpredictable ways, many of them breaking new terrain in warfare, Ducaru and his staff have to be prescient and agile. At the meeting of NATO defense ministers last month, they approved what they call an "updated cyberdefense plan" and also moved forward with discussing how to practically establish "cyber" as the latest operational domain, which means of course, that cyberattacks could hypothetically warrant a declaration of Article 5. But Teri also wanted to draw him in on an incident that had just happened -- the attempt by some "unidentified party" to accuse German soldiers serving under NATO in Lithuania of raping a teenager. This type of thing really makes me angry because allegations of rape are nothing to dismiss out of hand -- or to fabricate -- but this was completely made-up to try to discredit the NATO battle group. It also falls under an "emerging security challenge" faced by NATO. Ducaru explains how the alliance is approaching all its new threats and adapting the mindset in some surprising ways. This week's "Channeling Brussels" is brought to you by the Atlantic Council. [Intro/Outro music "Happy Rock" by Bensound under a CC-BY-ND license (www.bensound.com/royalty-free-mus…rack/happy-rock/)]