NATO's Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Lord Levene co-authored a column in The Telegraph of October 1, so accommodating is the Western "free press," to coincide with the conference of the same day.
They provided a litany of joint NATO-private business sector collaborations to protect the interests of the second party, Western-based transnational corporations, including but by no means limited to information technology, the melting of the polar ice cap, risk management for overseas investments and "storms and floods."
The article states that "industry leaders, including those from Lloyd's, have been involved in the current process to develop NATO's new guiding charter, the Strategic Concept; indeed, the vice-chair of the group is the former chief executive of Shell, Jeroen van der Veer." [3]
It also lays out far-reaching plans for military responses to a veritable host of non-military issues. "[G]overnments need to do some contingency planning...including focusing intelligence assessments on climate change, tasking military planners to incorporate it into their planning as well....They also need to step up their cyber-defences, as NATO has done in creating a deployable cyber-defence capability that can help its members if they come under attack."
The last item is an allusion to events in Estonia in 2007, cyber attacks variously ascribed by Western government and NATO officials to Russian hackers or the Russian government itself. No proof has been offered for the accusations, though that hasn't prevented major American elected officials from threatening the use of NATO's Article 5 collective military force provision for use in similar cases.
That is precisely what Levene and Rasmussen meant by endorsing NATO's "creating a deployable cyber-defence capability that can help its members if they come under attack."
The urgency of the demand of Lord Levene of Portsoken and former Danish prime minister Rasmussen for history's largest military bloc to protect Western commercial investments was expressed in an unadorned manner by the writers when they stated "Humans have always fought over resources and land. But now we are seeing those pressures on a bigger scale....
"We must be prepared to think the unthinkable. Lloyd's developed its 360 Risk Insight programme and its Realistic Disaster Scenarios, and NATO its Multiple Futures project, precisely to lift our eyes from the present and scan the horizon for what might be looming."
There will be no lack of opportunities for implementing what appears to be the heart of the new Strategic Concept.
Levene mentioned a thousand "determined and deadly threats" during his speech at the conference and Rasmussen started identifying them.
In his presentation at the conference the NATO chief framed his inventory of "deadly threats" by saying, "[T]he challenges we are looking at today cut across the divide between the public and private sectors....NATO, the EU and many Governments have had to send navies to try to defend against attacks. And it has cost insurance companies - many of which are part of the Lloyd's market - millions." [4]
The inevitable implication is that NATO and European Union warships are operating in among other locales the Horn of Africa so that firms like Lloyd's will have to settle fewer claims.
Rasmussen's speech included these pretexts for NATO interventions, these future casus belli, all in his own words:
Piracy
Cyber security/defense
Climate change
