The Heads of State and Government of NATO countries convened in Vilnius, Lithuania for a summit that took place on 11 and 12 July. This, unequivocally, was the most important meeting of the summer 2023. Due to a plethora of international issues, politics, and global security, this year’s event became the epicenter and confluence of significant issues requiring Allied Leaders to take definitive action. These decisions will have impacts for years to come.

The issue of the appropriate level of defence spending for each NATO Ally is as old as NATO itself. It touches upon two core debates for the Allies. First, as NATO’s mission is to ensure the security of the Euro-Atlantic area, defence spending supports the ability of Allies to preserve peace and to deter all threats, at all times.

This coming summer will mark the twentieth anniversary of the initiation of NATO's engagement in Afghanistan in August 2003, which ended in August 2021 as a result of the collapse of the Government of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan (GIRoA) and the return to power of the Taliban. This endeavour, extraordinary in both ambition and scope, brought together the commitments and contributions of troops and other resources by nearly 50 NATO and non-NATO nations from around the world, with the...

NATO’s 2022 Strategic Concept reaffirmed its commitment to NATO’s founding principles and to its core mission of collective defence and security in a Euro-Atlantic zone definitively ‘not at peace’. It also reiterated its long-held view that cyberspace, the global domain of interconnected information technologies and data, is ‘contested at all times’ by a range of state and non-state actors. Set against the backdrop of widespread competition in cyberspace between military and intelligence...

In the face of the “pervasive instability and threat” described by NATO’s Strategic Concept, Allies must do more to strengthen the resilience of our societies. We face a growth in the challenges we face together, illustrated by the UK’s Integrated Review describing the world as “volatile and contested”. As our National Resilience Framework sets out, we need a whole-of-society approach to better prepare ourselves for instability - and communication is crucial in delivering this by informing,...

How do innovators get better at anticipating and preparing for problems in the future? Most innovation efforts focus on problems in the present — ones that are easy to identify and thus to justify investing in (e.g. how do we make an airplane fly higher, or faster, or with fewer carbon emissions?) But focusing on the present can leave us unprepared for problems that may come in the future. It is equally valuable for innovation efforts to look beyond the present and to prepare for disruptions...

The USS Gerald R. Ford – the US Navy’s newest supercarrier, and the largest and most technologically advanced aircraft carrier in the world – recently crossed the Atlantic alongside warships from other NATO Allies. Aboard ship, two brothers mark the Ford’s first deployment – and one brother’s final flight.

The return of great power competition is reinvigorating the study of military alliances. In this article, Dr Pilster reviews three remarkable books from recent years: A. Wess Mitchell and Jakub J. Grygiel’s “The Unquiet Frontier” (2017); Mira Rapp-Hooper’s “Shields of the Republic” (2020); and Alexander Lanoszka’s “Military Alliances in the Twenty-First Century” (2022). The authors straddle academia and policy: Lanoszka is a political scientist with a specialisation in alliances; Grygiel,...

Today, the battle for hearts and minds is unfolding on the devices in the palms of our hands. The media environment operates with unfamiliar rules and without systems of checks and balances, and information proliferates at an extraordinary pace. How do governments and international organisations get ahead in this new war of narratives, and how do we secure the victory for truth?

I’d never served in the Armed Forces before. Hadn’t even done compulsory military service. I’d always been a journalist – both before 2014, when I lived in Crimea, and after 2014, when Russia annexed Crimea and I had to move to Kyiv. Then in 2022, on day two of Russia’s full-scale invasion, I went and joined the Armed Forces of Ukraine.

The last article that we are republishing as part of 70 Years of NATO Review was written by consistent and long-time NATO Review author, Michael Rühle, in April 2015. While that might not seem like very long ago, this piece is evidence of just how much has changed in the last eight-or-so years. In the 2000s and early 2010s, deterrence had become a dormant concept, all but cast aside at the end of the Cold War to make space for countering new challenges and enlarging the Alliance. In 2014,...

This article, written by former NATO Secretary General Lord Robertson at the end of his tenure in 2003, reflects on his four years at the helm. He oversaw one of the most turbulent periods in NATO’s history. The Cold War had ended. The troops were going home. Without the ever-present threat of Soviet invasion, Allies were rapidly demobilising their forces – eager to spend the 'peace dividend' on social programmes for their citizens at home, rather than on armed forces stationed abroad....

In 2022, the spectre of nuclear weapons use has returned to centre stage in Europe. From the very beginning of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in February of this year, Russian President Vladimir Putin has brandished his country’s nuclear sword in an attempt to compel Ukraine to capitulate to Russia’s demands and to deter NATO from intervention. This is the most significant attempt at prolonged, consistent, and conscious nuclear coercion against NATO and its partners in almost forty years. We...

Knowledge security entails mitigating the risks of espionage, unwanted knowledge transfers, intellectual property theft, data leakage and the misuse of dual-use technology (technology that is primarily “focused on commercial markets but may also have defence and security applications”). In the context of research on and the development of high-end technology, knowledge security is vital to NATO’s ability to deter and defend against adversaries and protect the prosperity of its members.

This article was written in April 1990 by Sir Michael Alexander, who was serving as the United Kingdom’s Permanent Representative to NATO. It reflects on the historic months that followed Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union and the subsequent fall of the Berlin Wall – the so-called ‘end of history’, per Francis Fukuyama. In the article, Sir Michael offers an eerily prophetic take on the future of the Alliance in the post-Cold War period. Highlighting the need to nurture the...

Climate change presents major challenges that NATO faces today, and will have to confront tomorrow. Space technology is playing an increasingly important role in helping to monitor rapid environmental change and identify related hazards.

This article was written in 1982 by Sir Clive Rose, a former Permanent Representative to the North Atlantic Council from the United Kingdom. In it, Sir Clive provides a personal view on the 1982 NATO Summit in Bonn, Germany, where Allied leaders agreed to invite Spain to join NATO. Forty years later, having just concluded the 2022 NATO Summit in Madrid, we can look back and see many familiar themes in Sir Clive’s words – but also notice some key differences between then and now. The 1982...

February 24, 2022, is likely to engrave itself on the history template of the contemporary world. Russia’s unprovoked, unjustified and barbaric invasion of Ukraine is not only a manifestation of a huge security danger that has shattered peace in Europe. More structurally, it has broken the entire security architecture built patiently on the continent over many decades, including international commitments agreed in the last 30 years. As the top UK general recently observed, it is dangerous to...

Protecting civilians is an ethical and strategic imperative and a crucial factor in the planning, conduct and assessment of military operations. NATO’s strategy and planning for the future needs to reflect that reality.

At the Brussels Summit in June 2021, NATO leaders agreed to begin work on a new Strategic Concept, which will be adopted at the upcoming Summit in Madrid in June 2022. The last such Concept was agreed back in 2010 when the world was a different place.

At the Brussels Summit in June 2021, NATO leaders agreed to begin work on a new Strategic Concept, which will be adopted at the upcoming Summit in Madrid in June 2022. The last such Concept was agreed back in 2010 when the world was a different place.

If global warming continues unabated, the World Bank estimates that by 2050, 216 million people will migrate within their countries in search of employment, food, and water security. Already, UNHCR data shows that, over the last decade, weather-related crises created twice as much displacement as conflict. Though such displacement often initially occurs within states– from rural to urban areas–as urban areas become more stressed, people are increasingly likely to move across international...

In 2022, we celebrate 70 years of NATO Review (formerly NATO Letter). Over the past seven decades, NATO Review has been offering expert opinion and analysis on a wide range of Euro-Atlantic security issues in articles that have sometimes been reflective, sometimes predictive, but always at the front line of debate. To commemorate this long legacy, over the course of 2022 we will be re-publishing a selection of NATO Review articles from throughout the history of the magazine. This article,...

The Alliance faces significant challenges from disruptive technologies and innovations in both conventional and hybrid methods of war. Distinguishing between uncertainty and risk can help to better prepare for emerging threats and to direct innovative initiatives to counter them.

Ups and downs in NATO’s fortunes are nothing new, and predictions of NATO’s demise are almost as old as the Alliance itself. What is remarkable is not the Alliance’s decline but its longevity. NATO has outlasted the Warsaw Pact by some three decades. Other Cold War alliances – the South East Asia Treaty Organisation (SEATO) and the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO) - passed into history in the late 1970s. All of which begs the question: why has NATO persisted when other alliances have...