Obama: 2012 G8 and NATO Summits Scheduled for May

12 March 2012

In this 2011 file photo, NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen, left, consults with President Obama, who hosts the 2012 NATO Summit in Chicago in May.

President Obama says he will host the 2012 Group of Eight (G8) summit of advanced economies outside Washington at the Maryland presidential retreat of Camp David to discuss long-term global economic recovery. He will also host the 28-member NATO Summit in Chicago this spring for talks on defense and security cooperation.

When the two summits were first announced, the White House had said it would host both events back-to-back in Chicago, the president’s hometown. But the president said during a news conference recently that splitting the two summits was an idea proposed to him after the initial announcement.

The G8 summit is set for May 18–19 and the NATO summit for May 20–21. The G8 consists of Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia and the United States. All but Japan and Russia are also members of the NATO alliance, though Russia participates in the NATO-Russia Council normally held on the second day of NATO's annual summit.

“Somebody pointed out that I hadn’t had any of my counterparts, who I’ve worked with now for three years, up to Camp David,” Obama told reporters at a March 6 White House press conference. Obama told reporters that security concerns for the G8 leaders did not prompt the change from Chicago to Camp David.

The presidency of the G8 rotates among the eight nations annually. Besides hosting the annual summit, the host country also sets the agenda for the meetings. The G8 invites other nations to deal with specific security and economic issues. There are also a limited number of meetings among individual leaders on the sidelines throughout the summit.

Camp David is an official presidential retreat located in the wooded hills near Thurmont, Maryland, which is about 100 kilometers north of Washington in the Catoctin Mountains. The facility is formally known as Naval Support Facility Thurmont and is staffed by Navy and Marine Corps personnel.

When it was converted into a presidential retreat in 1942 for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, it was named Shangri-La. It was renamed Camp David in the early 1950s by President Dwight David Eisenhower in honor of his father and grandson.

Obama said the G8 meeting, though an official summit of world leaders, tends to be an informal setting in which the eight leaders discuss a wide range of political, economic and security issues in a way more give-and-take than structured. He said his White House advisers believe that Camp David’s casual backdrop might be more conducive to the talks.

The global economy, still recovering from the 2007–2009 recession, has been buffeted by wide swings in oil prices, financial crises in Europe and slowly recovering employment. The United States, under a National Export Initiative launched by Obama, has been trying to shift a largely consumer-dominated economy to one more balanced with a broader export sector.

Obama said the G8 summit will give him his first opportunity to spend time with Russian President-elect Vladimir Putin. Immediately after the summit concludes, most of the leaders will travel to Chicago for the two-day NATO meetings.

The White House said the NATO summit “will be the premier opportunity this year for the president to continue his efforts to strengthen NATO in order to ensure that the Atlantic Alliance remains the most successful alliance in history, while charting the way forward in Afghanistan.”

Afghanistan is expected to be a significant topic for the 28-nation Atlantic alliance in addition to broader defense and security cooperation issues. The international alliance in Afghanistan is beginning a gradual transition process in which the Afghan National Army assumes an increasing role for the country’s security against a Taliban insurgency.

The strategy calls for the International Security Assistance Force to turn over increasing responsibility to Afghans and a full transition so that NATO's combat role is over by the end of 2014.

“Our coalition partners have agreed to it,” Obama told reporters March 6. “They are sticking with it. That continues to be the plan.”

The transition plan will be examined at length during the Chicago summit to make sure it is working as it was intended, that proper benchmarks and steps are taken during the transition, and that Afghan security capacity is built and the partnering with Afghan security forces is effective, Obama said.

When NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen visited Washington for talks with Obama in November 2011, they agreed that the Chicago summit should seek to further broaden and deepen NATO’s relationships with non-NATO partner nations, according to the White House.