Relations improved under US President Barack Obama, but tensions over CHRONIC underfunding of NATO and revelations that the US National Security Agency was spying on European citizens continued. At the same time, Obama worked closely with European allies on the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran, the Paris climate agreement and an ambitious and still incomplete trade agreement between the EU and the United States, known as the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The Berlin Plus Agreement consists of seven main parties:[1][3] Allies welcome the agreement reached between the Contracting Parties to begin discussions on defining the scope and parameters of a process to improve the functioning of the treaty in a changing environment. They expect active participation in this work with other States Parties to report on the first progress made at the OSCE summit in Lisbon in December 1996, including recommendations on how to proceed. The Berlin Plus agreement is the short title of a comprehensive set of agreements reached on 16 December 2002 between NATO and the EU. [1] These agreements were based on the conclusions of the 1999 NATO summit in Washington, sometimes referred to as the CJTF mechanism[2] and allowed the EU to use some of NATO`s military assets in its own peacekeeping operations. Since 2015, the issue has become more urgent, as Europe has experienced a wave of migration from the Middle East and Africa. Millions of people have risked dangerous journeys across the earth or the Mediterranean to escape war and poverty. The lack of a uniform response to the crisis has exacerbated tensions in the bloc, between countries such as Greece and Italy, which receive the bulk of arrivals, and countries such as Hungary and Poland that refuse to take in more migrants.

EU countries have taken controversial steps to stem the influx, including a 2017 agreement on the return of migrants to Libya and a 2016 agreement with Turkey to detain Syrian refugees. Ministerial meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Berlin 3 June 1996 Agreements are convened after a meeting of NATO foreign ministers in Berlin in 1996, when they stated that they were ready to “facilitate the use of separable but unsepared military capabilities in Operations by the Western European Union”.