| Published by Army University Press Military Review, July-August 2024 |
The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will celebrate its seventy-fifth anniversary at its 2024 summit in Washington, D.C. NATO’s age tells a story of alliance endurance through Cold War tensions, a difficult Global War on Terrorism, and now major war on its doorstep in Europe and a stubborn alliance search for conditions that enable peace. Remarkably, NATO’s founding treaty speaks of no evil. It does not mention or define any threat that NATO must counter. Instead, and setting the alliance on the path of enduring political relevance, the treaty is centered on the allies’ determination to “safeguard the freedom, common heritage and civilization of their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of law.”
Naturally, as a political-military alliance, NATO regularly assesses threats and challenges. Its framework document in this regard is the alliance’s Strategic Concept, which sets NATO’s political compass and guides the alliance’s detailed military planning. Strategic concepts in an alliance of thirty-two member states are tedious to negotiate, so allies aim for a document and framework that endures. However, all recognized that the last Strategic Concept from 2010 was, and certainly by 2022, extraordinarily outdated given the major war Russia had unleashed on Ukraine and the changes to the Euro-Atlantic security order.
Background photo courtesy of NATO: The 2022 Brussels summit in Belgium, a meeting of the heads of state and government of NATO, took place 24 March 2022 at NATO’s headquarters just one month after the February 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine. Following the summit, leaders released a joint statement condemning the attacks on civilians and calling on Russia to immediately suspend military operations in Ukraine.