This book provides a systematic approach which explores the domestic, regional, and systemic factors shaping Germany's role in NATO. Initially intended as stock taking of West Germany's interest and role in NATO over a forty-year period, this book has been transformed by events into a retrospective of what NATO has meant for West Germany and its partners between 1949 and 1989, and what NATO may mean in the future for a unified Germany, for a Europe spanning the Atlantic to the Urals, and for the USA.

This book addresses the evolving role of North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It seeks to answer whether NATO is capable of adjusting to changes in the forces that have held it together and have made it the centerpiece of the national security strategies of its members.