Murdoch echoed demands of a Republican presidential candidate in last year's primary campaign: Rudolph Giuliani, who in 2007 called for NATO to admit Australia, India, Israel, Japan and Singapore to its ranks as full members.
This January NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer while visiting Israel spoke on this and related topics:
"NATO has transformed to address the challenges of today and tomorrow. We have built partnerships around the globe from Japan to Australia to Pakistan and, of course, with the important countries of the Mediterranean and the Gulf. We have established political relations with the UN and the African Union that never existed until now. We've taken in new [countries], soon 28 in total, with more in line.
"[The] Alliance is projecting stability in Afghanistan, in Kosovo, in the Mediterranean (with Israeli support), and elsewhere - including fighting pirates off the Somali coast...." [33]
The incoming US ambassador to NATO, the Brookings Institution's Ivo Daalder, is reportedly an advocate of "Washington want[ing] NATO to be expanded by inviting counties like Australia, Japan, Brazil and South Africa and becom[ing] a global organization...." [34]
The mainstays for the evolving Asian NATO, or as Daalder's, Scheffer's and Giuliani's positions make clear an Asian NATO plus, are Australia and Japan with India eyed as the third leg of the stool.
Australia and Japan both have, in addition to hosting US military bases and deploying forces for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, entered on yet more dangerous ground by joining the American worldwide interceptor missile system.
In May of 2007 "Australia said...it had joined the U.S. and Japanese missile defense plans and would consider the deployment of a missile shield on its soil" at the same time that NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer announced that his "organization will create its own missile defense system, which would be linked to the American system." [35]
With US interceptor missile installations in place at Fort Greely on the Alaskan mainland and the Aleutian Islands in the Bering Sea facing Russia, the incorporation of Japan and Australia into the missile shield system complements plans for similar facilities and deployments in Poland, the Czech Republic, Norway and elsewhere in Europe, neutralizing Russia's deterrent and retaliation capabilities on both ends of its territory.
Ahead of a visit to Japan in October of 2007 Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said "Moscow regarded the joint missile defense effort as an 'object of concern,' expressing wariness over what he called the possibility that the system could be directed against Russia and China.
"We oppose the construction of missile defense systems whose purpose is to ensure military superiority." [36]
Lavrov would reiterate Russian concerns late last year when he "mentioned the problem of antimissile defences, which actually stands to reason, since the United States seeks to build such system on a global basis and deploy, among others, some of the system elements in Asia and the Pacific."
The report from which the preceding came concluded with the observation that "Moscow has major strategic interests in Asia and the Pacific, interests that invariably clash with no less significant US interests." [37]
A week later the US and Japan, in a significant return of the latter's military to Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, conducted a sea-based interceptor missile test.
"The Japanese missile destroyer Chokai will take part in a training firing session as part of the American-Japanese programme for testing a sea-based missile defence system, Christopher Taylor, a spokesman for the Pentagon’s Missile Defence Agency says, adding that the destroyer which is equipped with the AEGIS BMD Weapon System and with the Standard -3 interceptor missiles, has already arrived at the U.S.-operated Pearl Harbor Base in Honolulu.
"Missile defence complexes the Japanese destroyers are equipped with are linked to the U.S missile defence system.
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