NATO leaders are determined to adopt “seismic” solutions, which NATO members have long sought to implement, but have just as often failed. New challenges are coming, changes in collective defense, as well as a strategy update for the near future. Many members of the alliance have stepped up their efforts to bring about change in their quieter NATO neighbors who are conservative about revolutionary change. Politico writes about this process in an article by columnists Paul McLeary and Lily Baier.
The decisions facing NATO will put the alliance, which protects 1 billion people, on the path to one of the biggest transformations in its 74-year history. The plans, which are to be approved at a summit in Lithuania this summer, promise to change everything from annual allied budgets to the deployment of new troops and the integration of defense industries across Europe.
As the authors write, perhaps the greatest obstacle to this path is the alliance itself, which is an awkward collection of bickering nations with limited interests, and a bureaucracy that often promises much more than she does not deliver. Now the military bloc must capitalize on last year’s momentum to overcome bureaucracy.
However, talking and congratulating each other at conferences, promising is one thing, but doing it is another. Practice teaches the opposite, that traditionally NATO and the EU skillfully promise changes and set up committees and working groups to implement those changes, only to see later how they get bogged down in domestic politics and major civil unrest in the alliance countries.
Photos used: nato.int
