ABSTRACT
With the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Eastern Europe, NATO’s clear, well-defined role of collective defence (an attack on one member being an attack against all, who will collectively act to defend it) required re-evaluation and, perhaps, supplementing with other ‘desirable’ goals. This provided an overriding central theme throughout the 1990s, coalescing around three themes: enlargement of Alliance membership; building a positive partnership with Russia; establishing the geographical extent to which the Alliance should operate. The growing salience of ‘out-of-area’ operational concerns caused tensions within the Alliance given differences of view in national capitals as to the wisdom of activities (e.g. in the Middle East and Afghanistan). However, the Russian incursion into Georgia, ‘annexation’ of Crimea and fighting in Eastern Ukraine in 2014 pointed to a ‘return to fundamentals’ for the Alliance. As a result, there was a growing realisation that NATO’s hoped-for amicable relationship with Russia would not develop. Deciding what to do proved difficult until a full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 focused minds and resulted in the abandoning of hoped-for collaboration.
