For Nato, the past three years have been consumed by its focus on responding to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Although the war has been a priority for the alliance, this week’s Nato summit in The Hague has already been largely overwhelmed by the repercussions of Israel’s unilateral attack on Iran. And with the Saturday follow-up bombing of Iran by the Americans, the largest Nato member state has only deepened this diversion in focus.
However, this shift in Nato’s strategic focus is prompting a long-overdue consideration of how the bloc should address security challenges in the Middle East.
Although any discussion of a role for Nato in the Middle East would challenge perceptions of the alliance’s geographical and operational limits as a defensive force, Nato has emerged as much more than a North Atlantic bloc. For several years now, it has embarked on a more ambitious – but much-needed – campaign of “out-of-area operations”. These have included elements of crisis response, peacekeeping and counterterrorism, each of which was more about meeting the needs of a changing security environment than simply seeking a wider mission or mandate for Nato.
Such out-of-area operations have also reflected a broader and more sophisticated Nato focus on the Mediterranean as well as the Middle East and North Africa, and a deepening of Nato’s Partnership for Peace engagement with countries across the former Soviet space. In this context, Nato is no longer limited to the North Atlantic.
Looking to today’s daunting security landscape in the Middle East, currently driven by the Israel-Iran conflict but also defined by the October 7, 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, the imperative for Nato is to respond to security challenges and reject the strict constraints of geography.
Nato engagement in the Middle East should not – and most likely cannot – take the form of a new military alliance. Rather, Nato should emphasise local self-sufficiency and capability in addition to forging and fostering regional co-operation among the Middle Eastern states themselves. Although the Israeli and American military strikes against Iran would seemingly challenge this opening for Nato, the need for de-escalation and the necessity to climb down from the focus on military responses to Iran’s nuclear programme do offer an opportunity.
Even for Iran, such Nato engagement would broaden the context away from co-ordinated Israeli-American pressure to possible multilateral diplomacy by bringing in European Nato members. And even for the US, such Nato involvement would help to address the security concerns about a future restart of a nuclear programme by an emboldened Iran by beefing-up compliance and enforcement of subsequent proliferation safeguards.
The most obvious and natural pool of candidate nations for such Nato engagement comprises those countries with long-standing partnerships with the US, which Washington would be more inclined to support.
A key partner in this project of Nato engagement would be Jordan, given the already-robust support for the alliance from King Abdullah II. In fact, the most recent sign of an opportunity for Nato in the Middle East came from Amman, when Jordan agreed earlier this month to establish and host a Nato liaison office in its capital. That decision, which followed a preliminary agreement between Jordan and Nato in July last year, marks the first Nato diplomatic presence in the Middle East.
More broadly, Nato engagement would seek to counter sources of regional instability in the Middle East, with a focus on de-escalation of the Israel-Iran conflict and a smarter approach in finding a lasting resolution to the Palestine-Israel conflict. However, the current situation regarding Iran offers more peril than promise.
As The National’s US affairs columnist Hussein Ibish recently warned in these pages, “if [US President Donald] Trump joins Israel in striking Iran, the US will enter another forever war”, adding that Mr Trump’s “alarming trajectory for his administration’s policies” towards Iran, as well as Israel, does nothing to inspire confidence in Washington’s management of this crisis. In fact, the US has been moving closer to the Israeli position in recent days, with Mr Trump’s rhetoric more aligned with the Israeli leadership’s hardline narrative.
As much as Israel’s attack on Iran was calculated to undermine Washington’s diplomatic negotiations with Tehran, it was also designed to force the hand of Mr Trump into supporting the Israeli offensive. And given Mr Trump’s decision to bomb Iran, it is now clear that this Israeli gambit was successful. Thus, for the future of security and stability in the Middle East, it is the largely European Nato member states (with a pronounced Turkish role) that will be key to driving Nato engagement.
The timing of Nato’s entry into the Middle East would be critical, in three distinct ways.
First, it would follow a significant decline in power and influence of Iran’s proxy forces, including Hezbollah in Lebanon, Hamas in Gaza and the Houthis in Yemen. This further bolsters the chance for empowering these inherently fragile states after the demise and decline of local Iranian proxies.
Second, it would come amid the strategic shifts in the Middle East’s geopolitical landscape that began in December last year with the fall of Bashar Al Assad’s government in Syria and which continues with the possibility of abrupt change within Iran. It is this context that reveals the game-changing nature of the current Middle East, although the volatility and unpredictability of such geopolitical changes present as many threats as opportunities.
The third consideration of timing is rooted in the uncertainty regarding the US. With new questions hanging over America’s commitment to its own security obligations, both to individual Nato allies and the alliance itself, Nato engagement in the Middle East would also be a response to a dangerous security vacuum. And the unilateral, “go it alone” nature of the recent American military attack on Iran only demonstrates the danger of blind reliance on the US’s commitment to Nato.
As already demonstrated by the Trump administration’s erratic “America first” approach to Ukraine, Nato leadership has increasingly become more of an exercise in European strategic thinking, not because of the Americans but despite them. More broadly, Nato now faces a daunting vacuum, whereby geopolitics, like nature, abhors and resists any vacuum in power.
