ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the new role of the North Atlantic Alliance and its relevance to the Middle East region. The term ‘new’ is understood as the wholesale transformation of the Alliance and expansion of its area of interest, laid down by the 1949 Washington Treaty, in the post-Cold War world. To be sure, member states began the transformation process even before the demise of the former Soviet Union. It is work that continues until now, profoundly changing NATO from a Cold War collective security mechanism into a new organisation that takes a holistic approach to dealing with pressing security issues, attaching key importance to the political dimension. The whole transformation process has run, to a great extent, in parallel with the core postulates of liberal institutionalism. The aim of what follows is to evaluate the major trends of the transformation process and their bearing upon on the Middle East, as well as to show how the chosen theoretical framework has informed this process. In particular, this is made clear with respect to the impact of the two main strategic concepts as well as the two major vehicles of the transformation process – ‘enlargement’ and ‘Partnership for Peace’.
