ANKARA
Enlargement of NATO has improved security for the entire Europe-Atlantic area, U.K. Ambassador Richard Moore said Tuesday, contrary to the claims of critics.
A symposium called “The Contribution of NATO Enlargement to the Euro-Atlantic and International Security” was sponsored in Ankara by the Turkish Center of Strategic Research and the embassies of the NATO countries celebrating the 10th and fifth anniversaries of their NATO membership.
The enlargement of NATO is seen as a historic success and enhanced security for the entire area covered by the alliance, Moore said.
Not everyone shares that idea, however. Gulnur Aybet, the head of the International Relations Department at Ozyegin University, argued that there is now a question of whether NATO provides as much security as it is used to. She asserted that NATO makes inconsistent decisions in some cases, such as intervening in the crisis in Libya, but not in Syria.
Moore acknowledged that NATO faces new challenges, such as Russia’s intervention in Ukraine and the advance in Iraq of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL.
“Russia’s illegal aggression towards Ukraine has fundamentally challenged of our vision of a Europe whole and free," Moore said. "The crisis has shown why we need NATO and why all allies need to invest in our alliance,”
Still, Moore said NATO needs to ensure that it is prepared for emerging risks such as cyber-attacks.
Ahmet Muhtar Gun, the deputy undersecretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, agreed that expansion had helped the alliance's newer members.
“Turkey strongly believes that, with NATO, the new allies or the newcomers became stronger and with new allies, NATO became stronger,” Gun said.
He said that, in addition to traditional threats and risks, the world would encounter new threats such as terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, xenophobia, intolerance, Islamophobia, and concerns about energy security and cyber terrorism.
Radu Onofrei, the Romanian ambassador to Turkey, who initiated the symposium, said that the accession of countries had made a huge difference to the security of many states in Europe and in the all NATO countries.
“This initiative is meant to celebrate in fact the enlargement of NATO during these last 15, 10 and five years," he said. "In the last ten years, the enlargement is called by many analysts as the ‘big bang’ of NATO.”
The symposium was held to mark the 10th anniversary of the accessions to NATO of Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovenia, and the fifth anniversaries of Albania and Croatia.
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