World leaders gathered in Lisbon on Friday for a NATO summit to chart the alliance's path over the next 10 years and take major decisions on missile defence and relations with Russia, DPA reported.
Every NATO summit since 2003 has been dominated by the alliance's mission in Afghanistan, by far the longest and bloodiest operation in its history. Leaders hope to turn the Lisbon summit to future plans and debate a strategic blueprint for the next decade.
The summit will make NATO "more effective, more engaged, more efficient," said NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen in a video blog posted on the morning of the summit. He has called the meeting "one of the most important summits in NATO's history."
The main summit decision is expected to be a call for NATO to set up an alliance-wide system for shooting down ballistic missiles by bringing US long-range defensive systems to Europe and creating a computer programme which would link a number of different national defensive systems into a single network.
"A decision to develop a NATO-based missile defence to protect our populations would be a major step. It would make our territorial defence even more effective and it would bind the allies even more strongly together," Rasmussen said in another pre-summit blog.
Ahead of the meeting, France and Germany clashed over the question of how the missile shield should influence NATO's nuclear policy, with Germany pushing for a pledge on disarmament and nuclear-armed France insisting that the shield could not replace nuclear weaponry.
But on Friday morning, diplomats said that the two states had reached a deal, paving the way for a general summit agreement.
The summit is also expected to invite Russia to "explore the possibilities" of linking its own ballistic-missile early warning systems into the scheme, in a bid to reassure Russian fears that the NATO shield could be turned against Russia.
Russian President Dmitry Medvedev is scheduled to join the summit on Saturday, with diplomats saying that he is likely to accept the call to hold further talks.
However, Russia's ambassador to NATO, Dmitry Rogozin, questioned the rationale of the NATO plan, suggesting that it was on such a large scale that it looked as if it was aimed at Russia anyway.
"The NATO gamekeepers invite the Russian bear to go hunting rabbits together. The bear doesn't understand: why do they have bear-hunting rifles?" he posted on Twitter late Thursday.
The summit is also expected to call for NATO to cut by one-third its military headquarters in Europe, approve a reform blueprint for the next 10 years, and launch the process of pulling NATO troops out of the front line in Afghanistan.
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