I didn't live tweet the Warsaw Summit Experts's Forum as much today, as I had a bit less focus. Still, an interesting day (storify to come later as I need to go to the NATO BBQ and then the NATO disco [insert jokes about caveats and rules of engagement here]). The highlights/lowlights:
- I was part of a media scrum! The Canadian pool of reporters wanted to chat with some academics, so I had four or five reporters asking me questions while the cameras taped. It looked something like this:
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| That is my Canadian NATO partner in crime: Stefanie Von Hlatky |
- It was fun but different. I have no idea what they will or have used. The questions ranged, so I was asked about NATO and cyber (um, I dunno), the Canadian deployment to Latvia (now that, I have some opinions about), and other stuff.
- The Afghanistan panel was poorly attended, which turned out to be a good decision by most as the chair of the panel decided to lecture us about Afghanistan's history. Only after one of the organizers whispered in his ear did he relent. He didn't ask very good questions of the panelists, and left one, Michelle Basra, poorly utilized. She was quite incisive about the role of women in the conflict. Learned a lot in a short period of time. Alas, much wasted time (and, yes, I was playing a game of Eagles songs tweets at the time).
- The NATO communique came out during the afternoon, and those around me sped-read it. SVH gave me some highlights, so I tweeted thusly:
- And then word came out that the wonderful NATO-EU agreement yesterday was facing friction from the head of the EU after she saw NATO's Mediterranean commitment.
- The big question of the day: why 1k of soldiers per Baltic/Poland? Why four thousand over all? I will blog about it, of course, but the basic logic, I think, is that this was both the most and the least that NATO could do. What does that mean? Read a subsequent spew for some spew-planation.
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