The Cold War Atlantic alliance this year saw its first recruits from the former Soviet empire. We look at the challenges facing NATO as it adjusts to enlargement and its new global security role

Winston Churchill remarked at the end of the Second World War that it is much more complicated to keep a wartime alliance together to secure the peace. The USA and UK lost the USSR as an ally, but in signing the North Atlantic Treaty, 10 western European countries formed an alliance with Canada and the USA that could unite against the Soviet Union and its satellite states, yoked together into the Warsaw Pact bloc.

But when the Cold War ended with the fall of communism, many believed the organisation’s raison d’être of providing a physical defence against a land invasion was removed. Indeed, Ron Asmus, executive director of the Brussels-based Transatlantic Center military think-tank, told a New Defence Agenda conference on Reinventing NATO last month that although “in the 1990

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