NATO members need to get “back to basics” and work together for collective defense, he said, warning that hard work still needs to be done to find the money and will to deliver on the alliance’s founding goals.
“The brutal, unprovoked, illegal invasion by Russia of Ukraine” was “the greatest challenge to European and global security in my lifetime,” Cavoli said after receiving CEPA’s 2025 Lifetime Achievement Award at an October 8 event in Washington. “Ukraine can and must prevail.”
He said it had been an honor to be the uniformed leader of the US effort to help Ukraine after Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022.
“It was not always easy, but it was never as hard as a single day a Ukrainian experienced,” he told his audience, before praising Ukrainians who had earlier told the awards dinner of the brutality and war crimes committed by Kremlin forces in their country.
Cavoli said it had been a “privilege” to head up NATO’s operational force, which he led for three years, at the time its leaders realized they needed “to get back to the basics, to get back to collective defense.”
The alliance’s renewed focus on its core goals will need commitment from political leaders if it is to deliver, he warned.
“There are many, many hard days ahead of us as we do the difficult political work to carve out the fiscal space for the increases in defense spending that we’ve all agreed,” he said. “But we know where we’re going. We know how to do it. We have the plans, we have the agreements, and now we just have to do it.”
The son of a US Army officer who had emigrated to the US from Italy, Cavoli said the Transatlantic alliance was entwined with his own heritage, and its shared mission for global security is built on strong ties between Europe and the Americas.
“We have one simple thing as an alliance, just do what we agreed to do,” he said. “If we do that, and we will do that, we will fulfill our greatest responsibility, which is to secure the future and a future of peace and prosperity for our children and their children and their children.”
Thomas Penny is an editor and writer based in London. He has worked for local, national, and international news organizations, including the Mail on Sunday, the Daily Telegraph, Bloomberg News, and CEPA, and is now a freelance specializing in international relations, politics, and conflict.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
War Without End
Russia’s Shadow Warfare
CEPA Forum 2025
Explore CEPA’s flagship event.
