David H. Ucko

Bruce C. Jones, Shepard Forman and Richard Gowan, all of the Center for International Cooperation, New York University, have published a great edited volume on the changing U.S. relation to multilateral institutions since the Cold War, with particular emphasis on the changes brought on by the 9/11 attacks and by the events that they provoked. The book is entitled Cooperating for Peace and Security: Evolving Institutions and Arrangements in a Context of Changing U.S. Security Policy, is published by Cambridge University Press, and comes highly recommended.

Of course, it is my duty to draw your attention to ‘Whither NATO?’, the chapter written by Professor Mats Berdal, Department of War Studies, King’s College London, and myself on the evolution of NATO and its possible role in international peace and security. Offering an overview of NATO’s attempts at transformation since Kosovo, the chapter points to the need for NATO, on one hand, to embrace, more than it has done, stabilization and wider peacekeeping as core activities, and on the other, to think about more modest, yet still important military tasks that it has the capabilities to conduct and around which political agreement may also be struck, now between 28 member-states. It is not an entirely pessimistic take on the future of the trans-Atlantic alliance, but it should be considered a call for much greater realism regarding its constraints on NATO’s role as a global security actor.

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