Reflecting on North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) at 70, and the organisation’s eventful history, this book challenges the traditional crisis-led approach that sees crises as key driving forces that pushed the alliance in radically new directions. It assesses the long-term development of NATO since its foundation. Based on a wide range of case studies and on multinational archival research, the chapters in this book demonstrate the continuous effort of the NATO member states to build a shared political space and a common security thinking to enhance the Alliance resilience and deterrent function. The authors also correct the common tendency to focus on either the political or the military dimension of the Alliance. They show the deeply ingrained interdependence between the two and how their complexity has shaped the work, strategy, and development of NATO over time. Thanks to its innovative approach and long-term scope, this volume offers new exciting insights into the history of the Alliance. This book comprises articles originally published in Cold War History.

NATO is facing a unique crisis questioning its existence and future. This book provides a detailed in-depth economic and critical analysis of the issues. It considers whether NATO has a future and what it might look like 70 years ahead. NATO is undergoing a process of dramatic change, reorganising its functions, funding and strategic responsibilities to address growing regional and global threats. This book not only explores the contentiousness of economic and financial burden-sharing and the associated political and diplomatic stresses involved in the pursuit of common strategic objectives, but contributes to a further debate concerning the expanded scope and roles of the Alliance in the 21st century. This book combines NATO’s political controversies, complexities and conflicts with a treatment of the underlying theoretical economic frameworks. This book is essential reading for students in military staff colleges, university International Relations and Strategic Affairs Departments, but also to those working in government defence establishments, independent think tanks and political and economic institutions, generally.

Sayle's book is a remarkably well-documented history of the NATO alliance. This is a worthwhile addition to the growing literature on NATO and a foundation for understanding its current challenges and prospects.― Choice Born from necessity, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has always seemed on the verge of collapse. Even now, some seventy years after its inception, some consider its foundation uncertain and its structure weak. At this moment of incipient strategic crisis, Timothy A. Sayle offers a sweeping history of the most critical alliance in the post-World War II era. In Enduring Alliance, Sayle recounts how the western European powers, along with the United States and Canada, developed a treaty to prevent encroachments by the Soviet Union and to serve as a first defense in any future military conflict. As the growing and unruly hodgepodge of countries, councils, commands, and committees inflated NATO during the Cold War, Sayle shows that the work of executive leaders, high-level diplomats, and institutional functionaries within NATO kept the alliance alive and strong in the face of changing administrations, various crises, and the flux of geopolitical maneuverings. Resilience and flexibility have been the true hallmarks of NATO. As Enduring Alliance deftly shows, the history of NATO is organized around the balance of power, preponderant military forces, and plans for nuclear war. But it is also the history riven by generational change, the introduction of new approaches to conceiving international affairs, and the difficulty of diplomacy for democracies. As NATO celebrates its seventieth anniversary, the alliance once again faces challenges to its very existence even as it maintains its place firmly at the center of western hemisphere and global affairs.

Seventy percent of our planet is covered by water, and even in today's world of instant communication the global community is still heavily reliant on sea-based transport. The maritime domain has always been one of NATO's key strengths, but concerns about maritime security have taken on renewed importance in recent years, and NATO has been forced to re-examine some of its fundamental assumptions about the post Cold War security environment. This book shares some of the research, debates and findings from a NATO Advanced Research Workshop (ARW); Building Trust to Enhance Maritime Security, held in Geneva, Switzerland, in November 2014. The chapters in the book deal extensively with lessons learned by NATO from a wide range of policies, operations and situations. This maritime experience has been amassed from the Atlantic and Mediterranean to the Baltic and the Black Sea, and even into the Indian Ocean, as well as from the four decades spent defending NATO allies on the high seas during the Cold War. The single most profound lesson learned over the years has concerned the importance of efficient coordination. Structures and mechanisms have been created, not least in recent counter piracy operations, which enable a vast array of actors to work together in an efficient way, and which could prove invaluable in future efforts to counter terrorism and aggression worldwide. The safety of the maritime domain is essential to the freedom and security of all nations, and this book will be of interest to all those whose work involves maintaining that freedom and security.

NATO's decision to open itself to new members and new missions is one of the most contentious and least understood issues of the post-Cold War world. This book, an unusual and intriguing blend of memoirs and scholarship, takes us back to the decade when those momentous decisions were made. Former senior officials from the United States, Russia, Western and Eastern Europe who were directly involved in the decisions of that time describe their considerations, concerns, and pressures. They are joined by scholars who have been able to draw on newly declassified archival sources to revisit NATO's evolving role in the 1990s.

Modern warfare is almost always multilateral to one degree or another, requiring countries to cooperate as allies or coalition partners. Yet as the war in Afghanistan has made abundantly clear, multilateral cooperation is neither straightforward nor guaranteed. Countries differ significantly in what they are willing to do and how and where they are willing to do it. Some refuse to participate in dangerous or offensive missions. Others change tactical objectives with each new commander. Some countries defer to their commanders while others hold them to strict account. NATO in Afghanistan explores how government structures and party politics in NATO countries shape how battles are waged in the field. Drawing on more than 250 interviews with senior officials from around the world, David Auerswald and Stephen Saideman find that domestic constraints in presidential and single-party parliamentary systems--in countries such as the United States and Britain respectively--differ from those in countries with coalition governments, such as Germany and the Netherlands. As a result, different countries craft different guidelines for their forces overseas, most notably in the form of military caveats, the often-controversial limits placed on deployed troops. Providing critical insights into the realities of alliance and coalition warfare, NATO in Afghanistan also looks at non-NATO partners such as Australia, and assesses NATO's performance in the 2011 Libyan campaign to show how these domestic political dynamics are by no means unique to Afghanistan.

A head of title: Council on Foreign Relations, International Institutions and Global Governance Program.