Sir Stephen Lovegrove speech at IISS Manama Dialogue, November 2021
Thank you for inviting me to join you today at the Manama Dialogue. It is a great honour to be speaking here for the first time. And I am delighted to be in the Gulf, a region where the UK enjoys deep and long-standing relationships, and will continue to do so.
The success of this dialogue is not only a testament to the quality of IISS’s work, but also to the incredibly valuable role that the Kingdom of Bahrain plays in the region and beyond.
Now the Kingdom of Bahrain and the United Kingdom are united in many ways – not least as island nations.
As such, we share a deep understanding of how the ocean is tied to the prosperity and security of our peoples. It is one of the reasons we work so closely together and why, in 2018, the UK opened a naval support facility just a few miles from here.
But the ocean is the connective tissue that brings together the Gulf and Asia. And so today I want to talk about two overlapping and…
