Introduction — A New Paradigm for NATO?

Abstract

Historians and political scientists tend to yearn for turning points. The history of the Atlantic Alliance has been no exception in this regard and is one ripe with defining moments. Since the signing of the Washington Treaty on 4 April 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been a principal witness to some of the seminal events of the Cold War, from the Korean War that paved the way for the creation of NATO’s integrated military command structure and the integration of West Germany into the alliance in 1955 to the travails of Suez and Vietnam.¹ Its members have had to face the perils of the Berlin blockade and the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 1960s and confront the spectre of nuclear war. A sense of crisis has often accompanied the alliance on its long, and sometimes turbulent, path through its 64 years; on gloomier occasions, such as the French withdrawal in 1966 and the Soviet deployment of SS-20 missiles in 1977, and on more joyful days, as when the Berlin Wall came down in November 1989 and the Soviet Union disintegrated in December 1991, NATO has been no stranger to drama and tension. The end of the Cold War was perhaps the most defining moment of all, creating a sense of significant political discontinuity. In the absence of the Soviet threat that had defined its existence for 40-plus years, NATO’s very being was called into question, and the alliance struggled to articulate a new raison d’être.²