New Threat for Western Alliance : NATO looks to extremist danger in North Africa and the Middle East

Since the end of the Cold War, NATO has continued looking eastward, not because it still perceives an active military threat to European security from that flank but with a view to forging closer ties between its 16 members and the states of the former Warsaw Pact and Soviet Union. Now NATO has begun to look southward, to North Africa and the Middle East, with security very much on its agenda.

NATO has proposed talks with four North African states--Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Mauritania--and with Israel about security threats posed by extremist Islamic fundamentalists. (Algeria, the country most immediately threatened by such militancy, was left out of the proposed dialogue to avoid implying that NATO was taking sides in its bitter rebellion.) The goal is to develop a cooperative strategy to deal with what NATO Secretary General Willy Claes describes as perhaps the gravest threat to the Western alliance since the collapse of communism.

Three concerns in particular motivate the NATO decision. Foremost is the possibility of mass migration to Europe from Algeria and other North African states whose governments are being actively opposed by Muslim militants. Europeans fear that any such population transfer would add hugely to the social frictions many of the continental states currently face.

A second concern is that fundamentalists could become more militantly active in Europe. Finally, there is the abiding worry that rogue states to NATO’s south, most notably Iran and Libya, might acquire long-range missiles that could threaten Europe. Within NATO, the United States--still the keystone state in the alliance’s arch--France and Britain are all working on defenses against such weapons.

It would be an overstatement to describe the NATO initiative as a southern strategy. But it does mark a clear and prudent departure from NATO’s traditional concerns and so can be seen as a new mission. The prime movers were the Mediterranean states of France, Spain and Italy, but the consensus for the initiative underlines the seriousness with which developing events to the south are being viewed.