NATO training missions in Africa and the Middle East are fundamentally designed to serve European strategic interests, which are inextricably linked to the broader concept of collective security in the 21st century.

They represent a shift from traditional collective defense (Article 5) to Cooperative Security (one of NATO's three core tasks), focusing on "projecting stability" to the South. The primary strategic interest is to contain instability, counter terrorism, and manage migratory flows before they reach European borders, thereby enhancing the collective security of the Alliance members.

The Strategic Purpose: Collective Security via Forward Defense-

The defining feature of NATO's engagement in the Southern Neighborhood—which includes North Africa, the Sahel, and the Middle East—is the recognition that instability abroad directly translates into insecurity at home. This concept redefines collective security from merely defending the territory of member states to defending the stability of the Euro-Atlantic area through a forward, non-combat approach.

1. Countering the Direct Asymmetric Threat: Terrorism 

The most explicit European strategic interest served by these training missions is counter-terrorism. Terrorist organizations like ISIS, al-Qaeda affiliates, and others operating in the Middle East and Africa pose a direct threat to European capitals and citizens.

• NATO Mission Iraq (NMI): This is a non-combat training and advisory mission conducted at the request of the Iraqi government. Its goal is to strengthen Iraqi security forces and institutions so they can independently prevent the re-emergence of ISIS (Daesh). For Europeans, a stable Iraq capable of managing its own security is a key bulwark against the re-export of terrorism and radical ideology.

• Capacity Building (DCB): Training partners like Jordan and Tunisia (through the Mediterranean Dialogue and the Istanbul Cooperation Initiative) to enhance their border security, intelligence sharing, and counter-terrorism capabilities is a pre-emptive measure. This functions as a "tripwire" and a means of keeping the threat "at a distance." This approach is, therefore, a direct contribution to collective defense by addressing a shared threat originating from outside the treaty area.

Serving Core European Strategic Interests

While framed under the umbrella of collective security, the missions specifically target vulnerabilities that affect Europe more acutely than the North American allies, reflecting distinct European strategic priorities.

2. Mitigating Instability and Managing Migration 

Fragility, conflict, and a lack of governance in the Southern Neighborhood often lead to massive migratory flows and organized crime, which are deeply destabilizing political and social issues within Europe.

• Root Causes of Instability: NATO's 2022 Strategic Concept explicitly names the interconnected security, demographic, economic, and political challenges in the Middle East, North Africa, and Sahel, emphasizing their aggravation by factors like climate change and food insecurity.

• Capacity-Building as a Stability Tool: By training local military and security forces, NATO aims to improve governance, reduce corruption, and build stable security institutions. The desired strategic outcome for Europe is not intervention, but resilience in partner nations, reducing the likelihood of state collapse that could generate crises at Europe’s borders. In this sense, the missions serve the European interest in domestic political and social stability by externalizing the risk management.

**3. Strategic Competition (The "360-Degree" View) 

Recent geopolitical shifts have added a new, critical dimension to the purpose of these training missions: strategic competition.

• Countering Malign Influence: Regions like the Sahel and parts of the Middle East have seen increasing destabilizing interference from Russia (often via proxy forces like the Wagner Group/Africa Corps) and expanding influence from China. NATO's continued, albeit limited, presence through training missions serves to maintain Western influence and provide a cooperative alternative to these authoritarian actors.

• Maintaining the Transatlantic Link: For European allies, especially those less active in the Southern flank, participating in these missions demonstrates a commitment to burden-sharing and the "360-Degree" approach—ensuring that the U.S. continues to view NATO as a relevant organization for global challenges. This strategic alignment is a vital interest for Europe, whose primary defense remains guaranteed by the U.S. commitment to Article 5.

Constraints and Divergence: Where European Interests Take Precedence

Despite the rhetoric of collective security, the limited scope and specific design of these missions often highlight the limits of collective action and the primacy of individual European national interests.

A. Non-Combat and Limited Scope

The training missions (like NMI) are deliberately non-combat and small-scale. This design is a direct lesson from the "out-of-area" failures of the past (e.g., Afghanistan, Libya), where large-scale, costly interventions led to political fatigue and mission drift.

• Risk Aversion: European allies are highly risk-averse regarding large deployments in complex African and Middle Eastern environments. The training missions are a way to be seen as "doing something" without committing major military resources or risking significant casualties, thus protecting the political capital of national governments.

• French Preference for EU/Bilateral Efforts: Major European players like France, with significant historical and military ties in the Sahel, often prefer to use bilateral military cooperation or the EU's Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) for more robust or sensitive missions. This choice allows France greater speed, autonomy, and political control, bypassing the slow consensus-based decision-making process of NATO, demonstrating a clear preference for national strategic interest over the NATO framework for operational security in Africa.

B. The Overwhelming Priority of the East

Since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, NATO has shifted its focus back to its core task: deterrence and defense on its eastern flank.

• Resource Competition: The resources and political attention now dedicated to the Southern Neighborhood are significantly overshadowed by the commitment to the East. This means that while training missions remain active, they are undersourced and politically peripheral compared to the main collective defense effort in Europe. The Southern missions exist in a state of maintenance and low-cost investment, precisely because the higher-cost, higher-risk defense priority is now at home.

NATO training missions in Africa and the Middle East are a clear expression of European strategic interests in peripheral stability. The argument that they serve "European strategic interests more than collective security" is true only in a narrow sense: they are a specific mechanism to address distinct European vulnerabilities (terrorism, migration) that do not threaten the North American allies with the same immediacy.

However, in the broader, contemporary understanding of security articulated in the 2022 Strategic Concept, forward stability is collective security. By building partner resilience and containing threats at a distance, these missions function as an essential, cost-effective layer of forward defense for the entire Euro-Atlantic community. They are a necessary but limited investment in Cooperative Security that underpins the collective security of a transatlantic Alliance facing threats from all 360 degrees.