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| Dr Brendan Nelson (Wiki) |
By Daryl Morini
For The Diplomat
Brendan Nelson, Australian ambassador to Belgium, Luxembourg, the European Union and NATO, speaks with Daryl Morini about NATO’s Afghan mission and its future in the Asia-Pacific.
During NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen’s visit to Australia this month, Australia and the alliance released a joint political declaration. What does Australia expect, or hope to achieve, through its new partnership with NATO?
Historically, we built our foreign policy after World War II – our alliance with the United States, our foundational membership of the United Nations and a very slow, at first, ambivalent engagement with East Asia. But, having said that, we had really nothing to do with NATO.
In fact, in 2006, when I was defense minister, I actually said to the chief of defense that perhaps we should come to Brussels and talk to NATO. I remember I met SACEUR, a number of the military officials at SHAPE [Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe]. When I went back to Australia, I recommended to our government that we should become a contact country with NATO.
By 2008, we were becoming extremely angry with NATO. We had more troops in Afghanistan than more than half of the NATO members. We had skin in the game. We were in the south. NATO was making decisions about what we would do. They would tell us what those decisions were.
And then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was excluded from a leaders’ summit meeting, which made us extremely angry. When I spoke to the partners’ conference in Oberammergau, in January 2011, I said that we were very frustrated with NATO. In fact, it was one of the reasons why Rudd, as prime minister, asked me if I would consider taking this diplomatic posting. He said, perhaps the most diplomatic way I can put it, is that I should do whatever I can to open the doors at NATO.
So, in terms of this high-level political declaration, in 2010, when the Strategic Concept was being shaped at NATO, I recommended to our government that we should seek a long-term relationship with NATO that would take us well beyond Afghanistan.
Read the full Interview at The Diplomat