NATO leaders resume key summit; Afghanistan, Iraq on agenda

Obama is slated to take questions from reporters on Saturday before leaving the meeting of European leaders.

President Barack Obama says America is “not as divided as some suggest” while acknowledging this has been “a very tough week” for the nation.

“They will bring us closer to the criteria and then the people of Ukraine will decide what we’ll do further”, he said of the prospect of Ukraine’s eventual North Atlantic Treaty Organisation membership, which had been promised to Kiev in 2008 but is now off the table. But he concluded that with the multifaceted efforts being made, “NATO is as strong, as nimble and as ready as ever”. He said the U.S.is unique among advanced countries in terms of the scale of violence that it experiences.

He described the move as “a clear signal of our resolve to help tackle terrorism”.

The Pentagon has budgeted $3.45 billion in annual USA funds to pay for the Afghan forces, with the Afghan government providing an additional sum of around $420 million, for a total yearly budget of almost $5 billion. Allies would provide the remaining $1 billion. Dallas Police Chief David Brown has said former Army Reservist Micah Xavier Johnson, 25, was seeking retribution against white police officers for police-involved shootings throughout the country.

Nato Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg speaks at a news conference during the Nato Summit in Warsaw, Poland, July 9, 2016.

Maintaining NATO’s presence of more than 12,000 troops, the officials said, would ensure training would continue at the corps and ministerial level. The remainder will focus on the US ongoing unilateral counterterrorism mission Operation Freedom’s Sentinel, which targets al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group.

A senior US official said the non-U.S. allies would collectively contribute about the same number of troops to the mission as they do now, although individual countries’ numbers may vary.

Poroshenko and French President Francois Hollande both said the six leaders worked on a “roadmap” of security steps needed in Donbass to permit elections there in the coming months. “If we fail there we will certainly see that impact in our global counterterrorism campaign that we’re executing”. He said they were clearly going “to make a difference”. Germany will lead a multinational battalion in Lithuania, with similar battalions to be led by the United States in Poland, Britain in Estonia, and Canada in Latvia. He hoped the announcement would reassure allies about the United States’ long-term commitment and win new pledges of support. “And that is the unwavering commitment of the United States to the security and defense of Europe”, he said.

“Nato has begun preparations for escalating from the Cold War into a hot one”, Mr Gorbachev was quoted as saying by the Interfax news agency.

Russian Federation is even more critical of the Ballistic Missile Defence system that the U.S. is building to counter the missile threats from Iran or the Middle East.

The comments marked the third time in as many days that Obama has spoken, from a distance, about the police-involved fatal shootings of black men in Louisiana and Minnesota that were immediately followed by a sniper attack in Dallas that killed five police officers Thursday night.