ABSTRACT
The maintenance of the liberal order will depend on the collective willingness to bear the material costs and to protect and position that order in a broader Eurasian power balance through a flexible containment of Russia. NATO must also recognise democratisation as a fundamentally political struggle, which calls for credibility in the enforcement of conditionality through an agnostic commitment of political and financial capital. The illiberal challenges to the West itself require NATO to focus on securing democracy at home and to develop a geostrategic hierarchy of partnerships also focused on containment of instability from NATO’s southern periphery.
