The “NATO Run” Partnership Festival 2017 was organized for the 12th time with the support of NATO Public Diplomacy Division, by the Budapest Athletic Association. Last year, a fruitful working relationship was established with Euro Atlantic Diplomacy Society, thus we had the possibility to run an exhibition tent about the activity of our NGO during the whole event. Moreover, the Budapest Athletic Association has decided to extend their collaboration with our NGO and we officially became co-organizers of the NATO Run event.

This year, it has been introduced a special running programme for the Embassies at Budapest. The Embassies’ two-person team’s members would share the distance between each other and their representative teams will start among the field of 10 km and will be awarded separately.

At the end of the run, the Military History Museum hosted a roundtable discussion about NATO’s current policy, with a special focus on deterrence as a core element of NATO’s overall strategy. Thus, the main question at the beginning of the debate was focused on Why is it so important and valuable to have deterrence for preventing conflict and war, maintaining freedom of decision and action?

In order to make this year edition more special, Euro Atlantic Diplomacy Society invited Iulian Rotariu, a Romanian military firefighter that ranked fourth in the Gobi March desert race, to take part at the start of the NATO Run. Gobi March is part of the 4Deserts.com series, the toughest endurance competition comprising four ultra marathons. Each of them last seven days on a 250-km route in one of the toughest deserts in the world: Atacama Crossing in Chile, Gobi March in China, Sahara Race in Egypt and The Last Desert in Antarctica.