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  • NATO’s Transformation and New Partnerships:The Mediterranean
  • Alessandro Minuto-Rizzo (bio)

In two years time, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization Heads of State and Government will meet to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the alliance. It will provide a suitable occasion for them and their governments to chart the way ahead for NATO well into the future. After all, the key decisions relating to NATO policy and strategy have invariably been taken at summit meetings, and I expect the 2009 summit to follow this precedent. At the same time, NATO summit meetings provide security experts and commentators with an ideal opportunity to review the alliance's history and speculate on its future. I do not expect the 2009 summit to be any different in this regard. But the experts and commentators who are drawn to such meetings and are generous with their prophecies are all too frequently "outsiders" with a firm belief that an audience or readership will be interested only in bad news stories about NATO. So, to ensure a fair balance to that debate, and bearing in mind that I will shortly be at the end of a six-year tenure as the deputy secretary-general at NATO, I thought it would be an appropriate time for me to provide an insider's perspective on NATO's transformation and its future, in particular with regard to the alliance's relations with the Mediterranean region.

The Three Phases of NATO's Evolution

I firmly believe that when trying to predict the future for an organization such as NATO a vital first step is to look back over its history. NATO's fifty-eight-year [End Page 1] history can be divided into three distinct phases: first, there was the forty-year period of the Cold War; next was the decade following the end of the Cold War; and the current period is the one that began with the terrorist attacks on Washington and New York on 11 September 2001. Each of these periods posed very different security challenges for the allies. Each required a different set of responses. And accordingly, each of these three phases produced a different NATO.

NATO's Phase One: The Cold War

NATO's first phase was the Cold War. It was the East-West conflict, with a divided Europe as its focal point, that led to the creation of an alliance among ten Western European countries and the United States and Canada. On 4 April 1949, these twelve countries signed the Washington Treaty, in which they solemnly committed themselves to regard an attack on one as an attack against all. Over time, the Washington Treaty turned into a full-fledged organization, with a political council, regular meetings of allied foreign and defense ministers, and an integrated multinational military command. The alliance became the centerpiece of an emerging transatlantic community—a community that was based not only on common values and cultural ties but on a shrewd calculation of interests: for North America as well as for Europe, it paid to work together—and to stay together. The "transatlantic bargain" at the heart of NATO was simply in everyone's national interest.

Throughout the Cold War, NATO's role was essentially static: preventing an attack against the territory of its member countries. NATO's strategy was based primarily on the alliance's nuclear capability and involved only a very narrow political dimension. Even after 1967, when NATO adopted the strategy of flexible response and envisaged a degree of conventional warfare before crossing the nuclear threshold, nuclear weapons remained at the core of the alliance's strategy, and the political dimension of NATO's activity was limited. In essence, given the specific conditions of the East-West conflict, NATO could accomplish its objective by deterrence alone. As both sides knew what was at stake and thus exerted considerable caution in dealing with one another, the use of force to advance political aims was effectively excluded in Cold War Europe. [End Page 2]

NATO's Phase Two: The Post–Cold War Period

The Cold War ended after forty years. And many observers believed that NATO could then safely be disbanded, just as the...

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