Introduction: Congressional Views on NATO Enlargement: Limited Domestic Interest with Few Votes to Gain

At NATO’s 2014 Wales Summit, the alliance, across a number of issue-areas, reaffirmed its interest in expanding its outreach activities and partnerships. Whether it is the possibility of new partnerships on missile defense, the improvement of NATO’s Naval and cyber-defense capabilities to work more effectively with other international organizations, partners, or nonpartner states, or in general the backing for new partnerships, the Wales Summit Declaration expressed broad sentiment for an increasingly global military organization (Edström, Haaland and Petersson 2011). On future enlargement plans, most significantly the document states: