This conversation was recorded on October 9, 2025, and the transcript has been edited for clarity.
Natalia Kopytnik: It’s really an honor to welcome our guest today, Ms. Oana Lungescu. Oana served as the principal NATO spokesperson for over a decade, from 2010 to 2023, as well as a senior advisor to former Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen and Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg.
She’s not only the first woman, but also the first journalist and first spokesperson from the Eastern Bloc to hold this position. During her time in service, she was instrumental in NATO’s approach to Russia and China, the accession of Finland and Sweden, as well as operations in the Western Balkans, Afghanistan, and Libya. And prior to joining NATO, she had a 25-year-long career with the BBC covering EU and NATO affairs.
She is currently a distinguished fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, as well as a senior advisor at the European Policy Center. Oana, thank you so much for joining me today on The Ties That Bind.
Oana Lungescu: Thank you very much for having me. And thanks for that extensive introduction. It makes me feel very old, but very accomplished.
NK: So, as I mentioned your career at NATO has been characterized by many firsts. But I think for me personally, the most fascinating one in the context of this project is that you were the first spokesperson to be born behind the Iron Curtain. So I would be remiss not to start at the beginning of the story, which really starts back during the Cold War in your home country of Romania. And when I was doing some background reading, I saw you were part of a docu-series by the BBC called “State Secrets,” about the secret police archives during the Cold War. And you actually were finding your own Romanian secret police file.
So, going back to the beginning, can you briefly tell us about both your childhood in Romania, why the Romanian secret police had a file on you to begin with, and then later about your move to West Germany and how all of these experiences really set up your career trajectory?
OL: Yeah, it’s a long story, but as you say, I grew up in Romania during the Cold War. At the time, it was the most oppressed country in the Soviet bloc, which meant that we couldn’t really travel abroad. There was hardly any freedom of expression. There was no freedom of the media. Everything was controlled by the one-party state, which was the Communist Party, which was the communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu. So, we were fed disinformation and propaganda, basically, day in and day out, at school.
And NATO, for instance, was the enemy. Everybody was fearing some attack by NATO, whereas, of course, NATO is a defensive alliance which kept the countries that were members at that time free from the Soviet invasion.
Romania was actually occupied by Soviet troops after World War II like so many other countries in Central and Eastern Europe. And some of those Soviet troops basically only left Central and Eastern Europe after 1990.
So Romania was basically occupied territory where we were fed lies and propaganda. And so, it was very hard to find a window to the free world. And for me, that was a little transistor radio. I don’t know if people listening even remember that such a thing existed but I used to listen to my little radio literally under the bed covers because I was listening to foreign radio stations like the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, the BBC, World Service, Deutsche Welle, and others.
And why was I listening under the bed covers? Because I was afraid that my neighbors would hear the sound of the radio. Obviously, it was shortwave, so, very, very hard to hear and get good quality. But they could report me to the secret police, the dreaded Securitate, for listening to enemy broadcasts, as they were deemed at the time.
To cut a long story short, eventually I had to deal with the Securitate myself as a student. First, they tried to recruit me to report first on colleagues at university, then later they said, “Well, we know that your mother has left Romania and is in Germany. We know that your father is dying with cancer. We can help you get the medicines for your father and we can let you leave Romania in exchange for this, you will have to report for us on what Romanians abroad are saying about the government.”
And I said, “I can’t do that.” And I had no idea what would happen. Actually, it was a kind of a lottery. Sometimes they would just let you go. Sometimes you would end up in prison.
But it was something that I just couldn’t do. So I refused. I was then unemployed for a couple of years in Romania. And eventually they let me go. My father died in Romania without the medicines, and I was able to join my mother eventually in Germany. And then eventually I was also able to join the BBC, one of the foreign radio stations I had listened to under the bed covers.
And for the BBC, I went back to Romania after the fall of communism to look into the massive archives that the Securitate had on Romanians. And at the time, it was believed that about one in ten were informers for the Securitate—it actually turned out to be one in 30, but that was still a huge amount, including little children who were asked to spy on their families and friends.
So really, it was an archive of terror and fear in miles and miles of files. Yes, I was able to find my file, which was very sparse—I had done nothing, I was just an ordinary person. But of course, there were people who had, who were real dissidents, real critics, some of whom spent long years in jail or were tortured or even killed.
I think it was that machinery of fear which keeps an authoritarian state working. It doesn’t necessarily need to always do something directly to you, but you feel the fear weighing down on everything that you do, and it sort of paralyzes your decision making.
And for me, it was free communication, the free media that the United States and the UK and other Western allies were able to broadcast into what was then a very close society that helped me become free and become who I am today.
NK: What an amazing full circle moment to be able to work for a media outlet that you listened to secretly as a child.
How do you think those early experiences with an authoritarian regime, with living in fear of oppression and the culture of fear shape you? And then as a correspondent, obviously covering the end of the Cold War, shape your point of view and your style of communication later when you joined NATO?
OL: I think as an individual, it made me realize that you can’t take these things for granted. You simply cannot take freedom for granted. You can’t take a free press for granted, and you can’t take peace for granted. So, it made me feel that each of us has a role to play.
And it may be a very small part that we play, but still, if we decide that we are free inside, it’s worth behaving as if we are free and trying to change little things. Even if it’s just your own life or the life of a few people around you, then it’s worth doing. So, I think it’s this belief in the individual right to choose and to be free and to act in freedom and in truth, as Václav Havel, the famous Czech playwright, put it, who then became president of his country after the fall of communism.
So it’s this belief in the individual ability to act. We all have agency. We may feel that we are the whole, the system—an authoritarian system is meant to make you feel that you don’t have agency. But actually, we do.
It may be tough. It’s not going to be easy. But I think especially in democracies, it’s important that we remember this. I was lucky in many ways. I was able to do things that I could never have imagined. They were not in the world that I grew up in. They were not even imaginable. It was a different planet, if you will.
So, when I ended up at the BBC, I was part of the teams broadcasting to the former communist countries. I was able to broadcast back into Romania and in the other countries of the communist bloc, including in the momentous year 1989 when communism collapsed across Central and Eastern Europe, simply because the Soviet Union was bankrupt, it had lost the war in Afghanistan, and basically these countries started having for the first free elections in Poland. The people made these things happen.
So, it was possible. And then I continued, I went on to Brussels. The BBC sent me to the BBC Brussels Bureau to cover the European Union and NATO.
And that was another key moment in the history of Europe. It was 1997, and suddenly, there was the opportunity of both the European Union and NATO welcoming in new members from Central and Eastern Europe.
I was very privileged to have a front seat on all those negotiations as a BBC correspondent. They were really tough negotiations. It really is amazing when you keep hearing the Russians saying “NATO dragged all those countries, and the European Union dragged all those countries into the Western bloc,” which, of course, is totally wrong, because what happened was that it was these countries like Romania, like Poland, like the Czech Republic that wanted to rejoin the European family, the Euro-Atlantic family that they always felt that they were part of and that they were taken away, snatched away from by Soviet occupation and communist occupation.
So, it took a lot of reforms. It took a lot of very hard work by a lot of people. It took some sacrifices because there are rules of entry to these Western clubs. But eventually by 1999, 2004, both NATO and the European Union were able to welcome the countries of Central and Eastern Europe, which I think is one of the biggest and most amazing peace projects in the history of the world. And it’s really changed the face of Europe, it’s changed the face of the world, and it shows that things are possible and that freedom and prosperity and peace are worth fighting for.
NK: You mentioned NATO enlargement, which I was going to actually bring up as well, because obviously it would be hard to have this conversation without any mention of Russia. But I think this narrative that you mentioned of NATO enlargement provoking Russia, right, is unfortunately still perpetuated to this day in Western media often and frankly by many politicians still on both sides of the Atlantic, especially as discussions are ongoing about Ukraine’s prospects of joining NATO, which at this point seem very grim.
But I think it’s often overlooked that there were efforts indeed in place for NATO and Russia collaboration in the ‘90s, in the 2000s, which you, as mentioned, were involved in those processes. You saw those firsthand.
Could you tell us a little bit more about what those efforts were and perhaps, as you mentioned, you refuted this idea, but what would you say to this idea that NATO enlargement forced Putin’s hand in some way?
OL: Well, it’s the other way around. NATO enlarged because these countries were afraid of Russia. And they were afraid of repeated Russian aggression. And that’s unfortunately part of the history of Central and Eastern Europe, that Russia, the biggest country in the world, with the biggest territorial mass in the world, still feels that somehow it’s exposed to these small countries, which are democratic and prosperous on its periphery. And what that means for Russia is it’s not afraid of these countries militarily. It’s more afraid of democracy.
I think that we need to remember that. I think we also need to remember that each of these countries has the right to choose its own path.
Russia does not have more rights than any other country in the world, it does not have the right to dictate others on what they can or can’t do just because they happen to share the same geography. And the principle that each country has the right to its own path, including its alliances, whether it wants or doesn’t want to be part of a military alliance, this principle is enshrined in a lot of key European countries agreements, like the Helsinki Final Act, the Paris Charter that Russia itself has signed, and the NATO-Russia Founding Act. So all those principles are absolutely key. Russia itself signed on to them, and it has to respect them, just like it has to respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of all its neighbors.
This is a key tenet of the United Nations Charter, which again, Russia has signed on to. It also happens to be a member of the UN Security Council. So, I think these are basic fundamental principles that Russia has to respect. Russia is not different from any other country. So, just like it wants its own territorial integrity and sovereignty to be respected, it has to respect everybody else’s sovereignty and everybody else’s right to choose.
So this idea that somehow after generations of Russian domination, the countries of Central and Eastern Europe still had to bow to the will of the Kremlin is really to make a mockery of this idea that we have freedom.
We have the right to choose. We have agency. And I think it would have been impossible to tell the people of Poland or Romania or the Baltic countries that once again, you basically have to be in a Russian sphere of influence. That is part of history. It should stay in history. Each country has the right to choose.
So, those were very tough negotiations. I mean, the negotiations for the European Union took, in some cases, ten years.Negotiations for NATO obviously take a bit shorter [amount of time] because they’re basically about security and defense, but also about civilian control over the armed forces, intelligence services. Still, those negotiations also took many years. In terms of Russia, the negotiations for the accession of Central and Eastern Europe always took part, as far as NATO was concerned, in parallel with trying to strengthen relations with Russia and trying to build a partnership with Russia for the common good.
And I remember, I can tell you that back in 2010, when I joined NATO, it was the first summit, the Lisbon summit, when I was going to take over the role of NATO spokesperson, we had a meeting of the NATO-Russia Council.
Then President of Russia, Dmitry Medvedev, was there. One of my jobs, a thankless task that I had at the time, was to negotiate with Medvedev’s team about when he could do his press conference because the Russians were very keen to be the first ones to brief the media at the Lisbon Summit. And I told them we’ll make sure that President Medvedev can brief the media, but he cannot do that before the NATO Secretary General and before the President of the United States, which was President Obama at the time. So, that was quite complicated because they thought they had the right at the NATO summit to talk to the media first.
But NATO and Russia did a lot together, including, for instance, submarine rescue efforts and exercises, working on countering terrorist bombs on subway trains, for instance. And of course, all the Western countries helped Russia join the World Trade Organization and helped improve Russia’s economy. So there was a lot of goodwill for Russia and the hope that Russia would turn into a normal democracy. Unfortunately, that’s not what it is today.
NK: Indeed. So you became the principal spokesperson in 2010 and you mentioned a few of the activities that you had the pleasure of coordinating.
But can you tell listeners about what that role entails and what your primary responsibilities were? How did you see this role evolve over the ten-plus years that you were in service?
OL: When I joined NATO as a spokesperson, I thought I knew everything about NATO. I had covered probably around 20 NATO summits, I covered about 70 EU summits. And so, I thought I could do this. But of course, it wasn’t easy at all, because NATO is a political military alliance now of 32 countries, so, it’s a bit like three dimensional chess because the Alliance works by consensus. Everybody needs to be comfortable with a decision before that decision is actually made.
So, you have to coordinate as a spokesperson with all the member states, with all the Allies, and with all the military operations. [Meaning], all the commanders on the ground with the strategic commands: the two top strategic commands, Allied Command Operations in Belgium and Allied Command Transformation in Norfolk, Virginia, and also, of course, internally with all the divisions within NATO, the sections within NATO.
So, coordination was a big piece of what I had to do to make sure that we’re all messaging not with the same words, but in the same way with the same key messages. Because the main message for NATO is unity. It’s one for all and all for one. That’s at the heart of what NATO is as an alliance. It’s at the heart of the Washington Treaty, the founding treaty of the Alliance and of Article 5, the collective defense article at the heart of the Washington Treaty.
Whatever we did, it was about conveying and working towards that message of unity, because what our adversaries are aiming at is to divide Europe from North America, to divide us amongst ourselves, because they know that this is the way to undermine the Alliance. So unity is our biggest deterrence message, and that was my main aim in everything I did.
I was also working very closely with the Secretary General. I was very lucky to always be at the table. I think that’s a very important part of the communications role, that you are part of policy making, you have a seat at the table. You’re not just an afterthought, you are there, and you can also tell the truth to power. I told Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg, for instance, when we started the job, I have to be able to tell you things you may not like. And then, of course, you can and you will make your own decisions, which I will respect. But as a professional in terms of media and communications, there will be things which may have implications for how NATO is perceived, how the media perceives the Alliance, how the public does that. So I need to be able to tell you that.
And then, of course, we had to communicate what NATO decided, what NATO did to the broader public. And we had to do that much faster than we used to, and we had to do it in words that people could actually understand. So we sort of banned acronyms, for instance, except for NATO. NATO is okay, but otherwise there’s lots of complicated acronyms that our military colleagues love and some of our civilian colleagues love. So just saying no to acronyms was a big, brave step.
So I think those were the three main goals.
NK: The battle against acronyms is something that I can relate to personally. You mentioned some of the challenges, and obviously, every career has inevitable highs and lows, especially such a high-profile role as the one you were in, and, arguably, you were in charge of NATO communications at some of the Alliance’s most turbulent times.
Can you tell us about a moment that stood out to you as a high point where you felt like NATO was at its best and you were proud to be involved in that messaging?
And then perhaps maybe a challenging moment when there was a low point where things did not go as planned.
OL: I think probably one of the highest points is the accession of Finland and Sweden. Because again, that was unimaginable. Before Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, I think very few people, including ourselves at NATO headquarters, could have even imagined it.
It was extraordinary to be part of that process. For many years we were partners. NATO had a very strong partnership with Finland and Sweden, but there was no idea of them actually joining. It was their right to decide whether they wanted to do so. And the decisive point for them was December 2021, when, before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, President Putin presented a sort of ultimatum to the United States and NATO in the form of two draft treaties, basically saying there should be no more expansion of NATO, basically not with Ukraine, but also not with anybody else. So, not with Finland and Sweden either.
And then people in Finland and Sweden realized “But that’s taking our right to choose away from us. So, we now need to decide where we belong.”
And they decided they did not want to be alone in this very dangerous world with an aggressive, bad neighbor such as Russia, and that their only way forward was to join NATO. Then things moved very fast, and public opinion really shifted more or less overnight. And so within a few months, those countries on April 22 decided that they wanted to join NATO. It took a bit longer after that. Obviously, there were negotiations and Allies had their own security interests.
But ultimately, both Sweden and Finland are now sitting around the table. It really is a game changer in terms of geopolitics, in terms of how you can defend the Alliance, the value, the resilience, and the capabilities that they bring to the Alliance.
So seeing the flag of Finland—I was still at NATO, and the flag of Finland went up outside the NATO headquarters on the 4th of April 2023, which was also the anniversary of NATO’s founding.
And then Sweden a year later—that was an amazing moment, which really brought tears to my eyes. So, working with the teams of both countries and with the Allies through all the stages of this process behind the scenes and sometimes through speeches and interviews was really powerful political work because you had to calibrate quite carefully. But at the same time, it was a moment in history that was extraordinary.
In terms of the toughest moments, obviously, first was the invasion, the occupation of Crimea in 2014 by Russia, which I think came as a surprise to many, and then February 24, 2022, which was the full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
I think we were not so well prepared in 2014. Still at NATO, we responded by setting up something called Setting the Record Straight, which was a one-stop shop for debunking the Russian myths about NATO with facts.
And then in 2021, we thought, “We need to be more proactive. We have to learn from those lessons.” So we took this decision, which was unprecedented, to declassify vast amounts of intelligence together with the United States, with the UK, and to use those in our public communications.
So we went from debunking the myths to pre-bunking, to actually, in a way, using a sort of vaccine of truth to prepare our public for the lies and false flag operations that the Russians were preparing.
And I think we were able to prepare our public much better to explain who was the aggressor (Russia is the aggressor) and who was the victim of aggression (Ukraine is the victim of aggression), and why NATO needs to support Ukraine and also strengthen its own defenses considerably. So, we saw all the polling, and those were interesting for me because back in 2014 our publics were divided. They didn’t really know what had happened. About half of them thought that Russia was to blame. About half of them thought that Ukraine was to blame for Crimea.
In 2022, actually, the polls were much clearer. It was about 80 percent of our publics in the summer of 2022 that were very clear.“Russia is to blame. Russia is the aggressor. So we need to help Ukraine, and we need to make NATO stronger.”
I’m not saying this is just because of our communications, but I think, again, our communications were able to play a role in making clear what was happening, because, of course, the whole point of disinformation is to confuse you, to say, “Well, everything is great.” It could be that. It could be that or [the idea] that there’s nothing you can do.
But if you just make things very clear, then people are in a much better position to make up their own minds and then to be able to act based on that.
NK: Definitely. I think you mentioned public opinion and informing the public about what’s going on and setting the narrative straight. Obviously, over the last few weeks, few months, we’ve seen a real escalation in Russia’s gray zone campaign of microaggressions against NATO states.
And I think there is this debate, I think it’s fair to say, among NATO Allies about how to respond, balancing projecting strength and unity versus being fearful of escalation. And I think it’s clear going forward that NATO as a whole needs to be prepared not only for the 20th century style of warfare, but also the 21st century style of warfare, which in many ways has more of an impact on civilian life day-to-day because of the disinformation campaigns, because of infrastructure sabotage, cyber attacks, etc.
So what do you think are the greatest challenges going forward for NATO communications to explain this to people and to prepare them for such risks? And do you see any prospects for positive developments on this front?
OL: I think it’s really important that NATO continues to do what it’s already doing, which is to call out what Russia is doing, both together as NATO and also as individual Allies.
Some countries, for instance, Germany, Russia, as well as the UK, have regular briefings by their intelligence services to their parliaments, to their publics, just to lay out all the details of what is going on. Because often we’re flooded with information. There’s so much noise. It’s hard to cut through the noise to see what’s been going on for the last few years, which is that Russia is waging an unprecedented campaign of undermining, of sabotage across Europe. I think we haven’t seen that since the Cold War. And it’s not just across Europe, of course, it’s also sometimes in the United States, in Canada, and elsewhere.
The other thing that we’ve seen, obviously, with Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine is this unholy alliance, this alignment of authoritarian countries, because it’s not just Russia. Russia is getting help from China, from Iran, from North Korea directly for its war of aggression in Ukraine.
I think it’s important to see this broader picture and to understand that even though we, NATO, as a defensive alliance, have no interest in escalating a situation that’s already very serious, we [however] have the right to defend ourselves. And it’s important that we do so and that we’re not paralyzed by all these tests that Russia is conducting with the drone flights, incursions into our air spaces, and so on.
And that we’re able to see what matters, which is that we need first to continue strengthening our defense and deterrence and the decisions that were taken at the the Hague summit to increase defense spending to 5 percent of GDP. I think it is absolutely key, and that we need to [reach it] very fast, especially in Europe.
Second is countering disinformation, but also sabotage and the other sort of destabilization efforts that we see is not just a role for NATO or for our armed forces or for our governments: Actually, this is a whole-of-society effort. And if you want peace, you have to prepare for war. That is a very old Latin motto, which we need to remember right now.
It doesn’t mean that we want war, but we want to prevent war, and we’re not going to prevent war by being weak or appearing to be weak. We can only prevent war by showing strength. This is the idea of peace through strength, that only by being strong, you can also keep the peace. And so we also need to, in a way, arm ourselves mentally to see what’s going on, to be prepared not necessarily for conflict, but also for things like floods or forest fires.
So, just to be prepared for the first 72 hours of any crisis where your national authorities will be busy dealing with a crisis, to have the water and the food and the batteries and the battery-powered radio, going back to radios and candles and whatever you need, so that we know that we are ready ourselves. And then to be very vigilant, not just in terms of seeing signs of sabotage or espionage or whatever, but also to be vigilant in terms of our use of social media.
We see a lot of obvious reposting without checking the source, which is sort of basic, but you need to remind people all the time. And of course, we need to educate, and I’m speaking for myself as well, we need to educate ourselves much more when it comes to artificial intelligence, because we see, I think, in the space of two years, how fast it’s evolved in terms of AI-generated videos.
It’s even more complicated when it comes to AI-generated audio. So I think we all need to be a bit more tech savvy and to be ready for all these narratives and the artificially generated content that is out there to fool us and is out there to deepen our existing divisions.
If we as societies are divided, our adversaries don’t need to work very hard. They just need to deepen those divisions and to confuse us even further. So a lot of it has to do with working on ourselves to focus not just on what divides us, but especially on what unites us.
NK: Yeah, definitely. I just wanted to quickly go back to when you mentioned Finland’s accession to NATO, and what a proud and emotional moment that was.
Now, obviously, you’ve been a German citizen for a long time. You moved from Romania at an early age, but I’m sure it must have been an experience to see Romania join NATO right in 2004. Can you tell us a little bit about that moment in time and what it meant to you to witness that after everything you had been through?
OL: Yeah, I mean, I had witnessed the ebb and flow of those negotiations because originally in 1997, when the NATO accession of Romania and Slovenia, as well as the other three big Central European countries—Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic—were first mentioned, the decision was, “We’re just going to have the Central European countries, we’re not going to have Romania and Slovenia. And that was because they’re not ready.”
So that was a big blow to the Romanians and to the Slovenians who had to redouble their efforts to make sure that they would be in the next wave of accession. All this just to say that it’s not like anybody dragged these countries into NATO. Actually, sometimes there was a lot of reticence about them joining and more of them joining. Eventually, Romania and many others joined.
I remember it was at the old NATO headquarters across the road from the new one right now. And to be there with the ministers that had negotiated that agreement with some of the armed forces, who had prepared for a long time for that, and with the people at NATO, that again was very emotional. I remember watching then Romanian Foreign Minister Mircea Geoană watching the Romanian flag go up, and I could see he was crying. It was interesting and rewarding to see him many years later becoming NATO Deputy Secretary General, the first Eastern European to have that very senior post.
There are rewards at the end of this long road, but it’s not been easy. It’s been a really long and winding road. It’s the story of Europe, but it also shows that there are aspirations that can be met. We are now in such a dark and complicated period where you think, “Well, is anything possible?”
And I think we need sometimes to remind ourselves that even through the darkest days, yes, there can be light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s not easy and there’s a lot of work to get there.
NK: Thank you. And clearly, your memory of all these events is relatively recent, but for Americans, for example, there was no memory of accession if you’re a founding member, right? It’s been a while since 1949.
What would you like for Americans to really understand about NATO’s role in transatlantic security and why preserving and fighting for alliances like NATO is still so relevant to this day?
OL: This is an unpredictable and dangerous world that we live in. It’s a world where the challenges are so great that no one country can deal with them alone, not even the biggest and the most powerful countries.
When you look at the rise of China, for instance, not even the US can imagine in the long term being able to deal with that on its own. We all need friends, we all need allies, and in NATO, the United States has 31 friends and allies. It’s the biggest such family of nations, the most powerful, the most prosperous nations. Together, we represent 50 percent of the world’s wealth and 50 percent of the world’s military might.
The Alliance obviously benefits from America’s strength, but America also benefits from the strength of the other Allies in many different ways. It could be intelligence, it could be submarines tracking Russian submarines heading towards the US, or nuclear strategic bombers flying towards the US.
So there are direct benefits to the United States. And of course, there is political, moral, diplomatic support, and economic support, which is also important. I would also say the Alliance was formed in Washington. And I don’t think the founding fathers ever thought that the first and only time that Article 5, the collective defense article in the Washington Treaty, would be invoked for the United States. That happened right after the 9/11 attacks, the terrorist attacks on the United States.
And I remember being in Brussels at the time and going straight to NATO once I saw the first and the second plane hitting the Twin Towers in New York, because I instinctively knew NATO would do something. And within hours, it invoked Article 5. It sent AWACS surveillance planes to help the US patrol its airspace.
And later, it sent tens of thousands of troops from all over Europe and Canada and partner countries to support the United States in Afghanistan because of an attack on American soil and to prevent other attacks on American soil and on Alliance soil coming from Afghanistan.
That was really the sense of solidarity, of unity. We all stand together, all for one and one for all. And I think we need to preserve that sense of solidarity in this world and as we go into the next years and decades, because we can only be stronger together.
This is a world where we need to be strong.
NK: Well, Oana, this has been such a fascinating conversation. I could probably ask 50 more questions, but thank you for adding so much context and color to what was truly a pivotal time for NATO history. What a fascinating life experience and career experience. Thank you so much for joining us today on The Ties That Bind.
OL: Thank you so much. Thank you for everything you do.
