Volume XVII Spring 2012

This edition takes stock of some of the important issues in areas that are not only crucial for NATO but also for Turkey, and of how these issues can be managed in light of that relationship. NATO’s Secretary General, Rasmussen, opens this edition with a preface focusing on Turkey’s role in NATO. The Foreign Minister, Prof Ahmet Davutoğlu, provides an overview of NATO’s adaptability to a perpetually changing security environment, while offering some robust policy prescriptions on how to keep the Alliance alive into the 21st Century. These prescriptions offer useful insight as to how NATO must adapt further, even by engaging with rising powers such as Russia and China alongside like-minded traditional partners. In fact I foresee potential divergence between NATO and Turkey in engaging with global partners, and this is reflected also in the Minister’s policy prescription from a Turkish perspective. The Minister also underscores the importance of local involvement in overcoming regional problems. This is a principle likely to be shared for some time by NATO and Turkey. Rebecca Moore provides us with an exploration of NATO’s Partnership Policy adopted in April 2011, which moves towards a more tailor-made and flexible approach to individual partnerships and, as Moore argues, leaves a question mark over NATO’s more traditional partnerships with ‘likeminded’ members that share its values and norms. This also ties into the wider debate in this volume, revisited in other articles, about the changing nature of partnerships and whether these should be fostered for normative or strategic purposes. Sean Kay explores European Missile Defence as a necessary but problematic solution for collective defence requirements by providing an overview of missile defence debates within the Alliance, and an evaluation of the necessity and potentially problematic progress of the European Phased Adaptive Approach. In progressing with missile defence, the most significant problem foreseen down the road remains NATO’s relationship with Russia. It is this same relationship which provides the theme of Maxime Larive and Roger Kanet’s article. Apart from missile defence, Larive and Kanet identify NATO’s continuing intentions of Eastern expansion, the globalisation of NATO’s involvement, consecutive Russian policies to rebuild its status as a global power, and the different notions of NATO and Russia about the security of Europe as the main drivers of the deterioration of relations. Despite this pessimistic outlook, it seems that rivalry and cooperation go hand in hand, and cooperation still endures bilaterally between Russia and NATO member states and also within the NATO Russia Council. Perhaps one of the biggest challenges to NATO’s relationship with Russia is the emergence of a ‘two-tier’ NATO, one that still sees the championing of a liberal order beyond its borders, and another keen to engage in territorial defence against an old adversary that is returning to a status of great power.

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