The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is the world’s largest, most powerful military alliance. The Alliance has navigated and survived the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the post-9/11 era. Since the release of the 2010 Strategic Concept, NATO’s strategic environment has again undergone significant change. The need to adapt is clear. An opportunity to assess the Alliance’s achievements and future goals has now emerged with the Secretary General’s drive to create a new Strategic Concept for the next decade—an initiative dubbed NATO 2030. A necessary step for formulating a new strategic outlook will thus be understanding the future that faces NATO. To remain relevant and adjust to new circumstances, the Alliance must identify its main challenges and opportunities in the next ten years and beyond. This book contributes to critical conversations on NATO’s future vitality by examining the Alliance’s most salient issues and by offering recommendations to ensure its effectiveness moving forward. Written by a diverse, multigenerational group of policymakers and academics from across Europe and the United States, this book provides new insights about NATO’s changing threat landscape, its shifting internal dynamics, and the evolution of warfare. The volume’s authors tackle a wide range of issues, including the challenges of Russia and China, democratic backsliding, burden sharing, the extension of warfare to space and cyberspace, partnerships, and public opinion. With rigorous assessments of NATO’s challenges and opportunities, each chapter provides concrete recommendations for the Alliance to chart a path for the future. As such, this book is an indispensable resource for NATO’s strategic planners and security and defense experts more broadly.

"Berlin, 12 January 2030 - The crisis worsens. The Chancellor reaches for the telephone. He instructs his anteroom to put through a call to Germany's most important ally in order to discuss the situation and determine a further course of action." With whom would the chancellor speak? With the American, the French, or maybe even the Russian president? Or will the Chancellor only exercise representative functions while the real responsibility and decision-making authority lies with the President of the United Regions of Europe? This volume invites policy makers and politicians to use their imagination, to look beyond current events and take a long-term view on possible developments. Such projections, the author argues, lead to interesting conclusions for strategic planning.