Though in the same news conference reported above, Rudd also affirmed that "Australia will strengthen security cooperation with Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore."
There are two significant aspects to the last statement. The first is the nation not mentioned, China, and the second is that it reflects a basis for what for several years now has been referred to as Asian NATO.
The expression has been used since the beginning of this century but first gained wider currency after then US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz paid a five-day trip to Japan, South Korea and Singapore in May of 2003. The first two countries already had troops stationed in Iraq, and South Korea and Singapore would later deploy military forces to Afghanistan with the Japanese navy playing a supporting role in the Indian Ocean.
Asian NATO has been referred to with increased frequency over the past several years and the concept, and project, was poignantly demonstrated in the 2007 Malabar naval exercises in the Bay of Bengal where warships from India, United States, Japan, Australia, and Singapore engaged in the largest multinational exercise of its sort - 25 ships - in Indian history. The exercises ranged from "Vizag on the eastern seaboard to the Andaman and Nicobar Islands that guard the approaches to the Strait of Malacca, considered the world's busiest waterway." [19]
The Malabar exercises before 2007 were bilateral US-India affairs but two years ago were employed to showcase an emerging American-led Asian military bloc.
In most discussions of Asian NATO the term is used metaphorically, as in an Asian-Pacific military alliance that parallels the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in the Euro-Atlantic zone, if in no other manner than it is becoming a military bloc in a world that has only one other, NATO.
This loose connotation of the term doesn't do justice to the truth.
Even with the addendum that Asian NATO is an attempt by Washington to reproduce NATO in the Asia Pacific, also under its domination, it is not the full truth.
In fact what has developed is an ever-broadening structure for integrating Asian nations directly with NATO as well as with its individual members, the US primarily of course, and an extension of NATO into the East. Previous articles in this series have examined direct NATO penetration of Asia and the South Pacific [20], the stationing of the bloc's military forces and the securing of permanent bases from the Balkans to the eastern rim of the Caspian Sea [21] and efforts by the US and its NATO allies to establish a global naval fleet to dominate most of the world and the Asia Pacific region in particular. [22].
The main components of this absorption of the Asia Pacific zone include individual partnerships; establishment of bases and positioning of military, including combat, forces; actual invasions, wars and occupations; conducting regular Western-led multinational military, including live-fire, exercises; recruiting and deploying troops from Asian nations to war zones like those in Afghanistan and Iraq; and in general integrating the military of Asia Pacific states under the direction of individual NATO nations and the alliance collectively.
Applying the above criteria, as will be shown below or has been examined in reference to the South Caucasus and Central Asia in the Stop NATO articles referred to earlier, there are few nations in the entire Asia Pacific area, including the South Caucasus and West Asia (the Middle East), that are not to some degree involved in the process of creating a Western-dominated Asian military bloc.
Excluding several smaller island nations in the South Pacific, those exceptions are Russia, China, Laos, Myanmar, North Korea, Bhutan, Iran and Syria.
In addition to collective NATO partnerships partially or entirely outside of Europe and North America - Partnership for Peace includes all three South Caucasus and all five Central Asian former Soviet republics; the Mediterranean Dialogue takes in all North Africa nations on the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea from Mauritania to Egypt except for Libya as well as Israel and Jordan; the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative includes the Persian Gulf states of Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, with Oman and Saudi Arabia soon to follow, NATO has a category of individual partnerships it refers to as Contact Countries.
This is how NATO itself describes it:
"In addition to its formal partnerships, NATO cooperates with a range of countries that are not part of these structures. Often referred to as 'other partners across the globe' or 'Contact Countries', they share similar strategic concerns and key Alliance values. Australia, Japan, the Republic of Korea and New Zealand are all examples in case." [23]
The Alliance has de facto individual partnerships with Afghanistan and Pakistan and heads up a Tripartite Commission with both nations for the prosecution of the war in South Asia.
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