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172 nato after sixty years 172 NATO’s Global Reach The Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean Nathan J. Lucas At first blush, the idea of a chapter on NATO operations in the Indian Ocean and in the Persian Gulf regions seems a conceptual stretch. There is certainly no serious discussion about a major NATO operational presence in the region, and, given the lack of significant resources and attention that allies have put into the Mediterranean Dialogue with countries much closer to Europe, allies and regional states have not expressed a need or desire for NATO political initiatives in either the gulf or the Indian Ocean. Piracy in the Indian Ocean and Gulf of Aden off the Somali coast, however, led NATO in early 2009 to deploy, along with a large non-NATO international presence, a group of five naval vessels to conduct antipiracy operations.1 There has also been an effort by NATO-led military forces to conduct regional military-to-military cooperation and training with Iraq in the Persian Gulf and with a number of countries in the Indian Ocean.2 NATO critics have seen this as a foot in the door to the Indian Ocean, while proponents have stressed the mission off the Somali coast is largely an extension of the longstanding NATO interdiction operation in the Mediterranean Sea. Although this is not a major NATO undertaking, it is worthwhile to consider the implications of another out-of-area operation and what it means for the alliance. NATO’s authority for such operations comes from language in the Strategic Concept, agreed to by heads of state and government at the 1999 Washington Summit. Paragraph 48 states: The maintenance of the security and stability of the Euro-Atlantic area is of key importance. An important aim of the Alliance and its forces is to keep risks at a distance by dealing with potential crises at an early stage. In the event of crises which jeopardise Euro-Atlantic stability and could affect the security of Alliance members, the Alliance’s military forces may be called upon to conduct crisis response operations. They may also be called upon to contribute to the preservation of international peace and security by conducting operations in nato’s global reach 173 support of other international organizations, complementing and reinforcing political actions within a broad approach to security.3 (emphasis added) Both keeping risks at a distance and a broad approach to Euro-Atlantic security have given the alliance the impetus, over the past ten years, to engage in military operations and military-to-military cooperation across an increasingly wide portion of the globe. Most notably, the 1999 Strategic Concept has allowed for engagement and expansion of NATO well eastward of its Cold War geographic borders and justified the deployment of alliance troops into areas as far away from the European and Atlantic theaters as Afghanistan. It also has allowed for a much broader interpretation of how engagement and crisis response operations affect Euro-Atlantic security as a whole. Outgoing Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, in outlining the 2009 debate over updating the Strategic Concept, called for codification of this broad approach: First and foremost, I hope the new Strategic Concept will finally lay to rest the notion that there is any distinction between security at home and security abroad. Globalisation has abolished the protection that borders or geographical isolation from crisis areas used to provide. Article 5, as I have said, can apply outside NATO territory as much as inside. Today the challenge is not to defend our territory but our populations; and they, unlike our territory, move around. Our challenge is not just to make our populations secure, but feel secure—a much more complicated task which, to my mind, necessitates a much better job of communicating NATO’s activities and real achievements to our publics.4 This expanding concept of security, coupled with the willingness of allies to deploy forces increasingly to parts of the world far from Europe and the Atlantic, is a significant change in outlook for the alliance since the end of the Cold War. However , neither the 1999 Strategic Concept nor de Hoop Scheffer’s broad idea of security should, in themselves, explain why NATO forces are undertaking operational missions in both Iraq and in the Indian Ocean. One part of de Hoop Scheffer’s statement is interesting—that it is NATO’s mission to make populations in allied countries feel secure. In many ways, that task...

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