Key takeaways for NATO and the Middle East from the Washington Summit Declaration

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) gathered in Washington, DC, on July 9-11, to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Alliance. The Washington Summit Declaration starts off by duly recognizing this momentous milestone, but the rest of the document (communiqué) focuses on sustaining and improving the collective defense of the Alliance via three core tasks: deterrence and defense, crisis prevention and management, and cooperative security. Unsurprisingly, NATO heads of state and government remain primarily concerned with defending the territory and interests of NATO’s 32 member states. As such, at the Washington Summit, they mostly focused on efforts to counter Russia and to support Ukraine. However, the 2024 summit communiqué also addresses non-Euro-Atlantic risks and opportunities, based on the idea that “conflict, fragility and instability” elsewhere directly affects NATO security. Confirming the Alliance’s interests in the Middle East, the communiqué endorses NATO member states’ continued support for two substantive frameworks for cooperation, the Mediterranean Dialogue (MD) and the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI), and announces new initiatives to further NATO’s engagement in the region. More challenging for NATO’s Middle East partners reliant on hydrocarbon exports, the document also endorses continuing efforts toward an energy transition. Finally — and glaringly and disappointingly — NATO member states omitted any direct mention of the ongoing war in Gaza, despite the Washington Summit Declaration’s assertions of NATO’s steadfast and enduring commitments to the shared values that hold the Alliance together.

Russia and the war in Ukraine

NATO’s focus at last week’s summit on countering Russian aggression should come as no surprise given the Russo-Ukrainian war raging on the Alliance’s doorstep, the most severe conflict to have erupted on the European continent since the end of World War II. The year 2024 marks a decade since Russia’s initial invasion of Ukraine — which Moscow dramatically escalated in February 2022 — and as the communiqué acknowledges, “Russia remains the most significant and direct threat to Allies’ security.” Of the 44 total paragraphs in the Washington Summit Declaration, fully half focus on Russia: 11 directly discuss Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, and 11 more refer to risks, threats, or challenges from Russia indirectly. Another 10 cover NATO’s support to Ukraine. Thus, nearly three-quarters of the communiqué focuses on Russia or Ukraine, substantiating the priority the Alliance assigns to this issue. The communiqué announces that NATO, finally, a decade after the war started, is institutionalizing its security cooperation activities in support of Ukraine. The Alliance committed to providing €40 billion in funding within the next year and sustainable levels in out years, to be re-evaluated at annual summits, with a broad focus on capability development along the doctrine, organization, training, material, leadership, personnel, facilities and interoperability” (DOTMLPFPI) spectrum — although presented in the communiqué in terms of training, equipment, maintenance, logistics, transportation, operational costs, and defense industry development. That it has taken so long for NATO to institutionalize its security cooperation processes with Ukraine, a top non-NATO priority, suggests that lower priority non-NATO states — like those in the Middle East currently uninvolved in extant cooperative NATO frameworks — will be unlikely to find much institutionalized individual support from NATO.

Regional cooperation

However, most Middle Eastern states could join existing institutionalized cooperative NATO frameworks focusing on the region, if they are not already participating in said frameworks. To wit, the 2024 summit marked the 30th anniversary of the Mediterranean Dialogue (in which Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Mauritania, Morocco, and Tunisia partake) and the 20th anniversary of the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (which brings together Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates, and with which Oman and Saudi Arabia sometimes participate). While neither the MD nor the ICI represents the sort of robust security cooperation the 2024 communiqué institutionalizes for Ukraine, both frameworks provide opportunities for Middle Eastern states to cooperate with the Alliance and contribute to regional security. The Allies’ joint declaratory statement also highlights the expansion of several cooperative frameworks in the region, including: the Defence Capacity Building Initiative (which supports Iraq, Jordan, and Tunisia, among others), under which a NATO Liaison Office will open in Amman; the NATO Mission Iraq (NMI), which will be given an increased scope of support for Iraqi security institutions; and the NATO-ICI Regional Center in Kuwait, which NATO will reinforce.

Regional threats

The 2024 NATO summit also heavily focused on countering terrorism, hybrid threats, and hostile state and non-state actors. The communiqué asserts that, in the broader security environment characterized by “strategic competition, pervasive instability, and recurrent shocks,” “[c]onflict, fragility and instability in … the Middle East directly affect our [NATO] security and the security of our partners.” Placing Iran in the same category as Russia, China, and North Korea, and asserting that “Iran’s destabilising actions are affecting Euro-Atlantic security,” the joint statement warns that the Alliance is prepared to respond to these non-traditional threats by invoking Article 5, should such operations reach the level of an armed attack against a NATO member.

Climate change, energy, readiness

The communiqué acknowledges the reality of climate change, which it characterizes as a “defining challenge.” It explains NATO members’ energy transition as “coherent and coordinated” and notes that the Alliance aims to ensure military readiness during its energy transition. While NATO remains “committed to ensuring secure, resilient, and sustainable energy supplies, including fuel, to our [NATO] military forces,” that longer-term energy transition inherently and definitionally will decrease its members’ reliance on fossil fuels. For NATO, this potentially further deprioritizes the geostrategic importance of the hydrocarbon-rich Middle East, unless the region successfully makes the shift toward becoming a major global energy supplier from renewable resources, such as solar, wind, and green hydrogen.

Alliance values?

NATO heads of state and governments dedicated much space in the Washington Summit Declaration to rhetoric on the importance of what holds the Euro-Atlantic community together. The communiqué’s first paragraph concludes that NATO is “bound together by shared values: individual liberty, human rights, democracy, and the rule of law. We adhere to international law and to the purposes and principles of the Charter of the United Nations and are committed to upholding the rules-based international order.” Later, the communiqué prioritizes “[d]emocratic values, the rule of law, domestic reforms, and good neighbourly relations”; pledges the Alliance to improve its “human security approach related to the protection of civilians and cultural property”; and emphasizes NATO’s fundamental commitment “to international humanitarian law.” Most of this rhetoric is aimed at Russia. However, the Alliance missed a major opportunity to provide evidence of its commitment to what it asserts are global values and norms, as the communiqué omits any mention of Hamas’ terrorist attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, or of Israel’s subsequent, clearly norm-, value-, and law-challenging, war in Gaza. This omission, described by Washington Post foreign affairs columnist Ishaan Tharoor as the NATO summit’s unspoken “elephant in the room,” drew the ire of Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan. Erdoğan, in a mid-summit interview, defined Israeli actions as war crimes and violations of international law, called for sanctions against Israel, and accused the summit’s host, the United States, of being “complicit in these violations.” Perhaps for the sake of Alliance consensus (understanding, of course, that the US and many other Allies have a higher tolerance for potential Israeli law and norm violations than does Turkey), Erdoğan did not block the communiqué for this omission. However, his comments did draw attention to the conspicuous gulf between NATO’s asserted commitment to norms, values, and laws and the absence of any stated Alliance policy toward the war in Gaza.

Jeff Jager is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow with MEI’s Defense & Security Program and a retired US Army Foreign Area Officer (FAO).

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