Leaders mull adding Pacific nation, others

The plan is to boost global security.
BRUSSELS, Belgium (AP) -- New Zealand is just about as far from the North Atlantic as you can get. Despite the distance, leaders of NATO will next week be discussing how to draw the Pacific nation and other regional democracies further into its orbit.
The idea is simple, say supporters of the NATO global partnership plan -- principally the United States and Britain. Asia-Pacific democracies are already helping with troops or funding in Afghanistan. They share the North Atlantic Treaty Organization's ideals and have regional expertise. They boast diplomatic weight or military muscle.
So building political and military cooperation with Australia, New Zealand, Japan and South Korea to tie them to the trans-Atlantic alliance can only boost global security, the thinking goes.
"We all face the same threats and it is in their interests, as well as our own, that we come closer together," NATO Secretary General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, a Dutchman, said last week.
"In dealing with 'globalized insecurity,' it matters less and less where a country sits on the map," he told a Brussels defense conference. "What matters more is its mental map -- its willingness to engage, together with others, to make a difference."
President Bush plans to propose the expanded partnership with the alliance at next week's NATO summit in Riga, Latvia. Membership of NATO is not on the cards, but the Pacific nations would be invited to increase their participation in training and meetings.
"We seek a partnership with them so that we can train more intensively, from a military point of view, and grow closer to them because we are deployed with them, " Undersecretary of State Nicholas Burns said Tuesday at a State Department news conference.
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