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NATO's Strategic Direction after Riga

A grand strategy requires a grand vision, and that is what NATO leaders sought to provide in recent years. The core of this effort has been and continues to be to embrace a global perspective and the strategic requirements for change that it portends.Following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, NATO's main concern has been the fight against international terrorism and the containment of weapons of mass destruction. These priorities were translated in the formulation of an agenda that was adopted at the Prague summit in November 2002. Since then, the alliance has been engaged in the implementation of these decisions aiming at improving NATO's capabilities and strategic positioning in addressing the 21st century threats.The reality, as Ivo Daalder and James Goldgeier have asserted in the September/October 2006 issue of Foreign Affairs, is that NATO has gone global.1 Created to protect postwar western Europe, the alliance is now seeking to bring stability to other parts of the world. In the process, it is extending both its geographical reach and the range of its operations. In recent years, it has played peacekeeper in Afghanistan, trained security forces in Iraq, and given logistical support to the African Union's mission in Darfur. It also ferried supplies to victims of hurricane Katrina in the United States and to those of a massive earthquake in Pakistan.NATO's expanded ambit is the result of the new global politics that emerged after the Cold War. The new global processes have been changing the nature of threat and forcing some adaptation of basic strategic principles and patterns of allegiance associated with them. Each of these dimensions-threat, strategy, and affiliation-is understood most readily in terms of a sharp conceptual distinction between a deliberate opponent and a natural process, between strategies of prevention and strategies of reaction, and between cooperative and confrontational alignments.Awareness of the conceptual difference is important in determining the direction of appropriate adjustments. Traditional security policy has been concerned primarily with deliberate threat. For half a century, this has clearly been the dominant conceptual reference. In recent years, however, it has been disaggregated and rendered less specific by the major actors. The formulations of threat currently used-ranging from major regional contingencies, lesser nationalist and fundamentalist warprone regimes and groups, and the eventual emergence of peer competitors-refer to the deliberately aggressive actions of calculating enemies who are assumed to have conscious identity, even if they are not mentioned explicitly.The threat emanating from distributed processes has been very much in the background of security thinking and clearly subordinate to the logic of strategic confrontation. It seems that globalizing forces and processes have been making unintentional, distributed threats a much more prominent-an almost predominant-concern. To the extent that this occurs, the balance of strategy and affiliation keeps shifting.The strategic restructuring since the end of the Cold War has generated a new class of security problems whose dispersed processes pose dangers of potentially large magnitude and incalculable probability. Overall, there is a generally agreed assessment of security trends in the world beyond Europe. Within this assessment there is consensus on certain dangers and security challenges: terrorism that aspires to global reach and harm; proliferation of nuclear, biological, and chemical WMDs in the hands of countries and terrorist groups willing to use them; proliferation of conventional weapons and information technologies that, along with WMDs, support asymmetric strategies aimed at countering US and allied military force operations; rogue governments; state-to-state rivalries that produce military competition and threaten to erupt into war; ethnic tensions and radical ideologies that foster violence; growing potential for state failures, thereby creating domestic turbulence and mass migration; failing states that provide sanctuaries for terrorists and organized crime; ethnic, sectarian, and separatist instability and violence stretching from Africa through the Middle East and into south and southeast Asia; mass killing of civilians, especially in sub-Saharan Africa; and rising demands for fossil fuels, natural gas, and water, coupled with growing environmental degradation. …