A Simple Essay on the Role, Influence and Perspective of the Alliance in the XXI Century

Miccinilli Máximo

Working Papers - Programa Defensa y Seguridad from Argentine Center of International Studies

Abstract: In the last years, it seems to be a consolidated trend to read from important journals and reviews, link to world politics issues, that the word “Nato” implies itself an “antique category” or maybe an “old and ineffective mechanism of the Cold War”. Even if NATO’s adaptation, after the end of the Cold War was positive, spreading security and stability through enlargement to new members in Central Europe and applying force to impose peace agreements in Bosnia and Kosovo, some of the most valuable politicians and theorist describe NATO as a sort of sick octopus which tentacles have been losing influence since the Berlin Wall collapsed in 1991. After the 11-S, the mentioned trend tends to regain force and NATO seems to face something of an existential crisis. These people simply highlight, making a grotesque comparison, between the genetic goal (established in the Treaty of Washington 1949 ) of the Alliance and the current inexistence of a visible enemy to deter, strike or contain. The slogan works like a global alarm clock: “If the red ghost has been defeated, it’s time to wake up because NATO could be an Alliance but...against who?. This conception/perception on NATO, that considers the security alliance as an old reminiscence of the Cold War, is supported by a large number of exponents. The tricky point is that they will never affirm that NATO must disappear but they just attack the functionality and inefficiency of their multidisciplinary tasks. In this way, they undermine the real and potential influence that the Alliance could achieve in the next decade. In fact, there is a clear example in the statements that belongs to the former Prime Minister of Spain: “NATO is in a real and very deep crisis, despite its hyperactivity. Do you think that it is natural and acceptable for any politician in Europe to go to the public and argue for the multi-deployment of NATO in far away places, while people are being blown apart in trains and buses on European soil?”

Keywords: NATO; XXI Century; role (search for similar items in EconPapers)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.caei.com.ar/es/programas/dys/20.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
Argentine Center of International Studies, Cafayate 1031, CP: 1408, Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers - Programa Defensa y Seguridad from Argentine Center of International Studies
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Ariel González (). This e-mail address is bad, please contact .