Arshan Barzani proposes the very silly idea of “NATO expansion from within”:
Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty covers only Europe and parts of North America north of the Tropic of Cancer. Swathes of member countries’ land, such as Puerto Rico and French Polynesia, fall outside the pact. At NATO’s birth in 1949, this limit served to exempt far-flung colonies. Amid Russia’s war in Ukraine and Chinese saber-rattling, NATO’s self-imposed geographic limits absent the alliance from the Indo-Pacific and weaken it in the Atlantic.
The treaty rightly limits the obligations of alliance members because the only legitimate purpose of the alliance is to ensure the security of what the treaty calls the North Atlantic area. Trying to amend the treaty to include distant possessions and old colonial holdovers is a waste of time and would probably serve to divide the alliance for no good reason. If the U.S. and other governments wish to create collective security arrangements in other parts of the world, no one is stopping them, but extending NATO guarantees to cover the likes of New Caledonia and Guam is absurd. NATO has no role in the “Indo-Pacific,” and to the extent that it tries to have one it will come at the expense of its real responsibilities in Europe.
If the limits in the treaty represented a serious threat to the alliance, we would have expected that weakness to be exploited by now. If the Falklands War is the best and only example available, it’s a good sign that the problem isn’t so grave that it requires a major change to the treaty. More to the point, continuously extending NATO guarantees to more and more places has the effect of making them easier to challenge. It does not strengthen the alliance to make it responsible for protecting a number of territories scattered around the globe. It is at best redundant. It takes the idea of protecting “every inch” of NATO territory to a bizarre extreme.
Barzani claims that “case for expanding Article 5 to the Indo-Pacific is even more pressing,” but it isn’t pressing at all. No one wants this, and no one needs it. There is no security problem in the “Indo-Pacific” where the answer is the extension of NATO security guarantees. The fact that these regions are on the other side of the planet from the North Atlantic should have been the first clue that this didn’t make sense. Barzani continues: “America’s naval base at Diego Garcia, an Indian Ocean hub, is also unshielded.” He writes about this as if an Article 5 guarantee were needed to keep U.S. bases secure. If there were a government willing to attack U.S. bases in the Indian or Pacific Oceans, do we really think that this government would be impressed by an Article 5 guarantee? We’re supposed to believe that there is a government willing to start a war with the U.S., but the prospect of going to war with Slovenia and Poland will make them think twice?
The larger goal of this silly idea is to “turn Europe into a partner in the Indo-Pacific,” but this would be an unwise duplication of effort. The U.S. doesn’t need European allies to find new excuses to become more involved in other parts of the world. Washington needs European allies that will pull more of their own weight in securing Europe, if only so that the U.S. doesn’t have to carry as much of the burden. Getting them to pledge to defend Puerto Rico or the Falklands does nothing to help that, and to the extent that they take these new pledges seriously it could divert time and resources away from where they are most needed.