Fine Words, Few Answers: NATO’s ‘Not So New’ New Strategic Concept

Abstract

Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen told the Young Atlanticists on 19 November 2010 that NATO’s impending Lisbon Summit was one of the most important in the alliance’s history. It would, he pledged, see the adoption of ‘an ambitious new Strategic Concept that will launch an Alliance that will be more effective, more engaged, and more efficient’.1 This would be NATO’s third such document since the Cold War and the seventh in its history — but the first since the alliance’s post-9/11 transformation — and would provide the blueprint for the organization for the next ten years. In the event the Lisbon Summit went smoothly. Alliance leaders duly adopted to much fanfare a Strategic Concept designed to be the foundation for NATO 3.0, the third phase of the organization’s post-Cold War reinvention. At the same time progress was made on Afghanistan, the NATO-Russia relationship was energized and the alliance’s member states managed to avoid offering public evidence of disharmony.