NATO holds first meeting with ICI since it was launched in 2004

The foreign ministers of NATO and the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative (ICI) met on Tuesday and Wednesday in Brussels for the first time since the initiative was launched in 2004.

NATO established the ICI to facilitate security cooperation with its allies in the Middle East. The initiative’s current member states are Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates. Saudi Arabia and Oman have also shown an interest in joining.

During the meeting between the North Atlantic Council, the principal political decision-making body of NATO that consists of permanent representatives from its member states, and the foreign ministers of the ICI member states, NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen stated that the launch of the ICI ten years ago was of strategic interest to the Western alliance. He also said that security and stability on the European side of the Atlantic are in the interest of the Gulf region.

“We need to protect our sea lanes, energy supply routes and cyber-networks. We face complex and interconnected security challenges, such as terrorism, piracy and proliferation. They are challenges that we need to tackle together, ” Rasmussen stressed.

The meetings between NATO and ICI come in the wake of growing tensions between Western countries and Moscow after Crimea’s controversial secession from Ukraine and return to Russia, as well as the recent wave of Arab uprisings that continue to reshape the politics of the Middle East.

Interim Egyptian Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmi also attended the NATO meetings, which indicates that NATO tacitly supports the military coup in Egypt that toppled the country’s first democratically elected president, Mohamed Morsi. On Thursday morning, the Secretary General of NATO held a bilateral meeting with Fahmi, where they discussed several security issues.