ABSTRACT
North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s (NATO) Eastern challenges were legion and they arose both from within and without the organization. NATO's problems stem from the inability to determine what kind of threats, if any, it faces from the East. Rather NATO confronts an eclectic array of ill-defined uncertainties, potential instabilities, and all-too-real ethnic conflicts. Complicating NATO's search for the right niche in the new Europe with its array of organizations are national differences. It will be increasingly difficult to achieve any consensus on how best to approach the problems in the East given that multilateral and unilateral avenues are open to member governments. Lost amid the contemporary angst about the future of NATO is the simple thought that for North America, and perhaps even Western Europe, the security situation could be the best that it has been in the twentieth century.
