The NATO alliance is open to more engagement should India seek it, the US-NATO envoy said.
New Delhi:
While discussing NATO and strengthening ties with South Asia and the Indo-Pacific, US-NATO Ambassador Julianne Smith practically said the North Atlantic Treaty Organization is willing to engage more with India if it is interested. However, the ambassador stressed that the alliance has no current plans to expand it into a broader global military alliance.
“The NATO alliance is open to more engagement should India wish to do so. NATO currently has 40 different partners around the world, and each individual partnership is different. Different countries come to the door seeking different levels of political commitment, sometimes countries are much more interested in working on interoperability and standardization issues. So they are different. But the message that has already been sent back to India is that the NATO alliance is certainly open to greater engagement with India should that country be interested in pursuing it,” Smith said in a virtual news conference.
“Membership is something we haven’t really considered with anyone in the Indo-Pacific or Asia-Pacific. The alliance remains the Euro-Atlantic military alliance. Its door is open to the region. But there are no plans for the alliance to expand into a broader global military alliance,” she added.
In addition, speaking at the NATO Foreign Ministers Meeting to be held on April 4-5, 2023 at NATO Headquarters in Brussels, the Ambassador said: “At this stage, we would not want to invite them (India) to the NATO Council of Ministers until we knew more about their interest in broader engagement of the coalition”.
“Regarding next week’s ministerial meeting, 4 countries I mentioned (Australia, New Zealand, the Republic of Korea and Japan) are 4 countries that have already established formal partnerships with the Alliance for many years. They have worked closely with the NATO alliance on security challenges. These relationships continue. We have worked to strengthen these relationships. These are four countries that joined us at the Madrid Summit last year,” Smith said.
“In terms of the future with India, I think NATO’s door is open to engagement should India be interested. But we would not want to invite them to NATO ministerial meetings at this point until we know more about their interest in greater engagement with the Alliance broadly,” she added.
The envoy paid tribute to India’s role in the war between Russia and Ukraine and said she was grateful for the humanitarian aid India could provide to the country and appreciated India’s call for an immediate end to the war in Ukraine.
“We both at NATO and in the United States applaud what India has been able to do for the people of Ukraine. We are very grateful for the humanitarian assistance that India has been able to provide, which is vital right now and the need for which is only growing. Of course, you appreciate the calls from India for some sort of immediate end to the war in Ukraine. This is important. And we have been in constant exchanges with India about what we can do together to hold Russia accountable and we have done that and worked together with India having spoken to India several times since Russia started this war in Ukraine,” he said Smith.
“The United States and India do not always share exactly the same political approaches, but we share a commitment to upholding the rules-based order and ensuring that key principles, particularly around sovereignty and territorial integrity, are respected. I think that’s the most important part of our relationship,” she added.
Referring to NATO’s shift, the envoy highlighted how the Alliance has begun mentioning the Asia-Pacific and Indo-Pacific regions in some of its strategic documents.
“NATO has changed in quite noticeable ways in terms of how it conducts outreach and engages with its partners in the Indo-Pacific. If you go back 5, 6 or 7 years you would find an alliance that wasn’t necessarily rich on the agenda with the countries in the Indo-Pacific. Still, in recent years, NATO has begun to prioritize the Asia-Pacific and Indo-Pacific in some of its strategic documents,” she said.
“This is the first time the Alliance has recognized the importance of focusing on the PRC as a challenge for the Alliance and why it is important for NATO allies to improve their relationships with partners in the region and deepen, and NATO has just done that. We bring our friends from the Indo-Pacific to NATO headquarters for a ministerial summit, which we call the North Atlantic Council, so that we can learn from our partners what their experiences and security challenges are,” she added.
(Except for the headline, this story was not edited by NDTV staff and was published by a syndicated feed.)