NATO interested in engaging with India, says top official
World
The NATO alliance is open to more engagement should India seek that.
NEW DELHI (Web Desk) – The North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) has hinted at engagement with India if New Delhi shows interest, said US Permanent Representative to NATO Julianne Smith.
Addressing a virtual media briefing from Brussels, she said "membership is not something that we have 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 by the alliance to expand this to a broader global military alliance."
"The NATO alliance is open to more engagement should India seek that. NATO currently has 40 different partners around the World and each individual partnership is different. Various countries come to the door seeking different levels of political engagement, sometimes countries are much more interested in working on inter-operability, and standardization questions. So, they vary. But, the message that has already been sent back to India is that NATO alliance is certainly open to more engagement with India, should that country take interest in pursuing that."
While the NATO’s door is open for engagement with India, it will not be invited at this stage to any of the military bloc’s high-level meetings “until we knew more about their interest in engaging the Alliance more broadly,’’ Ms Smith said.
So far, she said there have been just some informal exchanges among NATO officials and some representatives from India at the Raisina Dialogue, she added.
Four countries from the Indo-Pacific will be invited for the NATO Foreign Ministers’ meeting in Brussels on April 4 and 5, she said. They include two Quad partners, Australia and Japan, besides South Korea and New Zealand. These four countries had joined the NATO Summit last year in Madrid, and also for the first time joined a NATO foreign ministerial in April 2022.
“Five, six, seven years, you would find that NATO didn’t have a particularly rich agenda with the countries in the Indo-Pacific. But in recent years, NATO has started to include mention of the Asia Pacific and the Indo-Pacific, first and foremost in some of its strategic documents,’’ said Ms Smith.
