Excerpt from the Dayton Daily News
Experts say the NATO Parliamentary Assembly will be a way for Dayton to show people from 32 countries what a Midwest city looks like, and an opportunity for Dayton to think more about international relations.
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization, founded in 1949 after the second world war, is an international organization that focuses on matters of security and promotes democracy, according to its website.
NATO has its own staff but the organization that will be gathering downtown May 23 to May 26 is the Parliamentary Assembly. Founded in 1955, delegates to the NATO PA are chosen by member countries and reflect the political composition of the parliament they’re coming from. About 369 people will be attending the PA as a delegate, observer or member from an associate country, according to NATO’s website.
NATO’s parliamentary assembly is meeting in Dayton to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Dayton Peace Accords, which ended the Bosnian Civil War and were negotiated at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. The war was a three-and-a-half-year armed conflict in the former Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia. NATO armed forces played a role in ending the war, including sending U.S. air strikes, according to reporting at the time.
But the other reason is a local congressman’s longtime connections to both Dayton and NATO.
U.S. Representative Mike Turner was chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence from 2023 to 2025. In 2011, he was appointed as the chairman of the U.S. delegation to NATO, and he currently serves as Vice-Chairman of the Defense and Security Committee of the NATO Parliamentary Assembly, according to his website.
