NATO in an Age of Risk

Abstract

NATO most likely never envisioned that a treaty organization founded to prevent and, if need be, defend against, the Soviet invasion of Western Europe would find itself on a state-building campaign in Afghanistan. Yet, today that is where NATO fights for the Alliance’s future. This is a result of how the West has come to conceptualize security. When security in the transatlantic area meant an ability to deter and counter a Soviet attack, NATO was well positioned as a collective security organization with a clear mission. In the post-Cold War era, however, there has been no clearly defining threat akin to that of the Soviet Union. Yet rather than the predicted new world order, the end of the Soviet threat brought disorder. The post-Cold War world is one of state disintegration, weapons proliferation, ethnic cleansing and terrorism. In this new world of disorder, NATO has worked to rearticulate its security framework through the concept of ‘risk management’.² This new articulation has enabled the Alliance to broaden its remit and intervene in a variety of new contexts, even contexts for which its ambitions outstrip its skills.

Throughout the Cold War, we contained a global threat to market democracies; now we should seek to enlarge their reach, particularly in places of special significance to us. The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement — enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies.

Anthony Lake, 1993¹