The NATO Summit this year is getting a lot of attention. In years past, it was mostly a specific subset of foreign policy enthusiasts who paid attention to the summit. This one is different.
For years, if there was any public debate about the identity and future of NATO, that debate mostly revolved around whether the alliance should continue to exist at all. That’s unfortunate but you can understand. Two of the three most high-profile operations NATO has been involved in since the end of the Cold War—Kosovo and Afghanistan—were bad for NATO credibility in the popular imagination, regardless of how well or poorly the alliance performed in those operations. The question of NATO credibility was further complicated in the last decade by a trend within the West of turning inward and away from multilateralism.
Read the rest of Shane Szarkowski's editorial here.
