The five ex-NATO chiefs - Peter Carrington, Javier Solana, George
Robertson, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and Anders Fogh Rasmussen - said the
imposition of EU sanctions against Russia and Iran, a move led by
Britain, showed the importance of the bloc.
Ex-NATO and U.S. defence chiefs warn UK against EU exit(Reuters)
Former NATO secretary generals warned on Tuesday that a British exit from the European Union would help enemies of the West while ex-U.S. foreign and defence chiefs cautioned that Britain would have less clout outside the bloc.
The
double warning comes as the two campaigns for and against Brexit step
up their rhetoric about the impact staying or leaving the EU would have
on Britain's security.
Prime Minister David Cameron said on Monday that Britain was safer in the EU while former London mayor Boris Johnson,
a member of his Conservative Party, accused him of suggesting World War
Three would break out should Britons vote to leave in a referendum on
June 23.
The five ex-NATO chiefs - Peter
Carrington, Javier Solana, George Robertson, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer and
Anders Fogh Rasmussen - said the imposition of EU sanctions against
Russia and Iran, a move led by Britain, showed the importance of the
bloc.
"Brexit would undoubtedly lead to a loss
of British influence, undermine NATO and give succour to the West's
enemies just when we need to stand should-to-shoulder across the
Euro-Atlantic community against common threats," they wrote in a letter to the Daily Telegraph newspaper.
In
a separate letter to the Times, 13 former U.S. secretaries of state and
defence and national security advisers from every U.S. administration
from Barack Obama's to Jimmy Carter's in the 1970s said Britain's global
position would suffer if it left the EU.
"We
are concerned that should the UK choose to leave the European Union, the
UK's place and influence in the world would be diminished and Europe
would be dangerously weakened," said the letter signed by, among others, former Secretaries of State George Shultz and Madeleine Albright.
Their warning echoes a similar message from Obama during the U.S. president's visit to Britain last month.
Those
campaigning for Brexit have repeatedly dismissed such warnings, saying
membership of NATO, rather than the EU, was key to British security.
In
a sign of deepening divisions within Cameron's own party, Iain Duncan
Smith, the former Work and Pensions Secretary, said Germany had
sabotaged the prime minister's plans to renegotiate Britain's
relationship with the EU, forcing him to drop his plans to demand an
emergency brake on migration.
"They have a de facto veto over everything,"
Duncan Smith told Tuesday's Sun newspaper which accompanied their story
with a picture of German Chancellor Angela Merkel holding a puppet
Cameron.
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