NATO Decides Its Future

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Pajamas Media:

The leaders of the 28 member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) meet in Lisbon, Portugal, on November 19-20 to chart the future course of the transatlantic military alliance. The gathering in Lisbon is being billed as one of the most important summits in the history of the alliance.

The centrepiece of the NATO summit will be the unveiling of a new strategic concept, or mission statement, to shape the way the alliance defends itself against threats over the next decade. NATO has struggled to define itself in a post-Cold War world of expanding threats and shrinking budgets, and in Lisbon the alliance will try to lay out a vision for itself as a more agile grouping better able to deal with the security realities of the 21st century.

The strategic concept will reconfirm NATO’s commitment to its core task of mutual defense in Europe, but it will also stress the need for the alliance to ensure that it can mount expeditionary operations elsewhere in the world, such as its ongoing mission in Afghanistan, or the anti-piracy operations off the coast of Somalia.

The document will embrace the deployment of a land-based NATO missile-defense system and approve cost-cutting plans to reduce overlapping weapons systems and streamline the alliance’s command structure. It will also stress the need for alliance members to modernize their armed forces to deal with contemporary security threats, such as cyber security.

NATO’s new strategic blueprint will endorse U.S. President Barack Obama’s disarmament vision of a “world without nuclear weapons,” although it will also stress that NATO will remain a nuclear-armed alliance for as long as others have such weapons.