Parenting & Family Quote by Lord Robertson

A veteran NATO chief reaching for his most memorable moment and landing on “meeting children” is a studied choice: it’s the safest possible emotional register for an institution often defined by hard power. Lord Robertson isn’t reminiscing about summits, deterrence doctrine, or crisis management; he’s selecting an image that recasts geopolitics as human contact, with children as the unassailable moral currency. It’s a diplomat’s move, softening the steel of NATO into something that can be narrated on television without triggering the usual reflexive arguments about expansion, bombs, and spheres of influence.

The geography matters. “Moscow and … Kiev” isn’t just travelogue; it’s a symbolic bridge across the fault line NATO has spent decades trying to manage. By placing Russian and Ukrainian schoolchildren in the same sentence, Robertson offers a quiet counter-story to the adult world of rivalry: the suggestion that futures are not predetermined by today’s antagonisms. The line “countries where I’ve gone to” is clunky, but the clunkiness reads as sincerity, or at least as the performance of it. In diplomacy, polish can sound like evasion; awkwardness can sound like truth.

There’s also strategic subtext. Children are a proxy for legitimacy: if you can claim you were welcomed by classrooms, you imply you weren’t merely projecting power, you were being received as a partner. In the NATO-Russia-Ukraine triangle, that’s an argument without making one. It sidesteps blame, re-centers empathy, and quietly asserts that the real stakes of security policy are lived far from negotiating tables.