"It is a great privilege to follow the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness (John Woodcock), who gave an extremely eloquent, entertaining and serious speech.
I will try to speak briefly. The great challenge here is to try to work out, after nearly 60 or 70 years of this debate, …..." Rory Stewart - View Speech
"The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point, but I think the fundamental nature of our disagreement is going to be about our whole relationship to the NATO structure and the kind of role we wish to play within it. Although the hon. Gentleman is speaking very eloquently about nuclear …..." Rory Stewart - View Speech
"If the hon. Gentleman wishes to intervene again, I would be very interested to hear what he proposes Britain should do to defend the Baltic states against such an attack...." Rory Stewart - View Speech
"With respect, as I suspected, the hon. Gentleman is focused on issues like East Timor and humanitarian intervention which have very little to do with the question of NATO. This whole idea of an attack on one being an attack on all is fundamentally predicated on the idea of deterrence. …..." Rory Stewart - View Speech
"We can, of course, agree with the hon. Gentleman on that. That is true. One of the questions is working out what Britain is going to do, but of course the biggest question for Vladimir Putin is what the United States is going to do. But the reason why these …..." Rory Stewart - View Speech
"I agree absolutely, and that is a very important point. This NATO obligation is an unbelievably serious and important obligation. We have stretched it absolutely to its breaking point. If we are going to be serious about it, we have to follow through and that absolutely means we should not …..." Rory Stewart - View Speech
"My hon. Friend pointed out in an essay that Maurice Hankey had said that we had failed to predict the 1870 Franco-Prussian war. Most recently, we failed to predict Russia going into Ukraine and Daesh taking over western Iraq, so I agree very wholeheartedly with my hon. Friend...." Rory Stewart - View Speech
"Is there not a paradox? If we reduced the nuclear arsenals so that only the United States and NATO possessed one we would have the problem that an attack on one would be a response by one. The absence of diversity would make the NATO structure much less resilient. ..." Rory Stewart - View Speech
"I am trying to understand this more broadly, strategically speaking. Is this not in danger of being an argument simply that the whole of NATO should be freeloading on the United States?..." Rory Stewart - View Speech
"Setting aside the fact that there will be no foreign combat troops on the ground, will the Secretary of State tell us what is the difference between the 2007 strategy in Iraq and the strategy today? In particular, have we a new counter-insurgency doctrine, is there a new Sunni outreach …..." Rory Stewart - View Speech