João Gomes Cravinho spoke at the opening of the colloquium "Portugal and NATO – the 70th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation", which took place at the parliament in Lisbon.

Cravinho took the opportunity to list "three challenges to the alliance in its immediate future, and in which Portugal is particularly committed," including updating the NATO strategic concept or "ensuring coherence and complementarity between NATO and European defence.”

Another challenge is the "reinforcement of NATO's maritime position and the centrality of the Atlantic,” and Cravinho noted that this alliance "maintains an updated strategy and operational capabilities relevant to protecting the maritime spaces that surround its members” and also ensure the “security of the heart of the Euro-Atlantic community,” the Atlantic Ocean.

Thus, Cravinho said, "Portugal is particularly interested and available to reinforce the alliance's maritime capacity, namely its submarine capacity," showing that the country can "reinforce the importance" of this contribution "in the near future.”

“The nature of the threats that can affect our security and our allies is changing rapidly, as it is also changing the international context in which our security is defined,” he said.

“Not updating, not modernising, not innovating, either at the doctrinal level or at the technological and operational level, those would be extremely serious strategic errors,” he said.