Daily Inspiration Quote by Lord Robertson

"If we get the capabilities" is doing nearly all the work here. Lord Robertson isn’t daydreaming about NATO and the EU as a feel-good superteam; he’s issuing a conditional warning dressed up as optimism. The line flatters both institutions with the promise of “amazing things,” then quietly indicts them for not being ready. Capabilities, in this register, means defense spending, interoperable forces, intelligence, logistics, cyber capacity, political cohesion - and the unglamorous industrial base to sustain a long fight. It’s a word that lets a diplomat say “you’re underperforming” without picking a fight with any capital.

The pairing of NATO “along with the European Union” is also strategic. It signals a division of labor: NATO as hard security muscle, the EU as economic leverage, regulation, enlargement policy, sanctions architecture, reconstruction money. Robertson’s subtext is that Europe’s power only becomes convincing when these tools are aligned, not competing. That’s a pointed message in a post-Cold War ecosystem where institutional turf wars are easy and coordination is hard.

Contextually, Robertson’s era as NATO Secretary General sits at the hinge of NATO’s identity crisis: enlargement eastward, Balkan interventions, and later the shock of 9/11 pushing NATO into expeditionary thinking. The line anticipates the recurring European dilemma: ambition without means. It’s a soft-spoken demand for seriousness, framed as possibility so it can travel across parliaments, budgets, and public skepticism.