So, what exactly is NATO’s purpose? That question hangs like a cloud of existential angst over the Atlantic Alliance’s 60th birthday celebration this weekend. The festivities, which will span the Franco-German border, are suffused with the symbolism of a Cold War that brought NATO into being but whose end left the Alliance with no clear mission or identity. Hence the title of this anniversary summit: “NATO in 2020: What Lies Ahead?”
Today’s world is vastly changed from that of 1949, when the U.S. and Europe agreed to pool their military resources and combine to resist any westward encroachment by the Soviet Union. Most of today’s leaders of NATO member states were not yet born when the Alliance was forged, and almost two decades after the Soviet Union’s collapse, military analysts see the Alliance as being mired in an identity crisis. “It’s entirely unclear what NATO’s reason for existence is after 1989 [the year the Berlin Wall came down],” says Tarak Barkawi, a senior lecturer in international security at Cambridge University’s Center for International Studies.
