Rick Rozoff: NATO Reinforces Pentagon's Shift to the Asia-Pacific Region

On September 24, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization granted Iraq the second individual Partnership and Cooperation Program under the auspices of the bloc's latest military collaboration and integration framework partners across the globe. The latter program, for which the substantives are occasionally capitalized, NATO's latest, incorporates to date eight nations in the broader Asia Pacific region, including West Asia, the Middle East, that have supplied troops for the US led military organization's war in Afghanistan, under NATO consultative arrangements and training programs like the Afghanistan- Pakistan -ISAF Tripartite Commission, the NATO Training Mission Afghanistan and the NATO Training Mission Iraq. The partners across the globe currently are Afghanistan, Australia, Iraq, Japan, Mongolia, New Zealand, Pakistan and South Korea. Among the 50 nations providing NATO with troop contingents for the war in South Asia are additional Asia-Pacific states not covered by other international NATO partnership formats like the Partnership for Peace, including 22 nations in Europe, the South Caucasus and Central Asia, the Mediterranean Dialogue, with seven nations in North Africa and the Middle East, with Libya to be the eighth, and the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative, which targets the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council, including Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Those states, Malaysia, Singapore and Malaysia, are likely the next candidates for the new global partnership, as are Latin American troop contributors like El Salvador and Columbia. The inclusion of the last will mark the expansion of NATO, through memberships and partnerships, to all six inhabited continents.