Kay Bailey Hutchison: “this is an amendment that I believe is agreed to by both sides. I am very pleased that both sides have agreed to this…”

“this is an amendment that I believe is agreed to by both sides. I am very pleased that both sides have agreed to this because it deals with NATO expansion and is something that I think will strengthen our ability to expand NATO, will make sure that we have considered many of the potential problems that could arise, and have a dispute resolution process to deal with those so that we will not have to call on Article Five. As everyone knows, Article Five says that any attack on any NATO country is an attack on the United States or any of the other NATO allies. We want to make sure that, if there is a border dispute or some sort of internal dispute within a country or between two neighboring countries or between any two countries who are members of NATO, we have a dispute resolution process so that we can have a way for people to go to the bargaining table, and the process is a binding arbitration--much like binding arbitration in labor negotiations in the United States--so that rather than have a question about whether we are going to be on one side or the other in a military conflict, that we have a process that everyone who is a present member of NATO and any future members of NATO would agree to that would be perhaps--this is not in the agreement yet--perhaps where each country in the dispute would pick one other country in NATO as their representative. Those two representative countries would then pick a neutral representative to arbitrate the differences.”