They believed that the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), to which all European states as well as the United States and Canada belonged, could take over responsibility for maintaining peace and security on the continent.

In this turbulent setting, the leaders of NATO countries addressed the question of whether or not NATO was needed. Instinctively, all the leaders of the time believed that NATO should be preserved.

Some argued that NATO was not only a political and military Alliance, but that it represented a community of values linking North American and European democracies. Its role was therefore much more than just a defence against military threats. Others saw NATO as an “insurance policy” against future threats. Others pointed to new risks and uncertainties which could only be met by cooperation between countries to enable them to handle their common security problems jointly – and declared that NATO provided the necessary and the only suitable structure for such cooperation. Meeting in London in July 1990, less than nine months after the Berlin Wall had come down, the Heads of NATO Governments issued the “London Declaration on a Transformed North Atlantic Alliance,” announcing a “major transformation” of NATO. They recognised that everyone’s security was inseparably linked to the security of their neighbours and offered both friendship and cooperation to their former adversaries.

They also agreed that NATO should review its military structures and its nuclear and non-nuclear strategy in order to bring these up to date. They set in process a major overhaul of Alliance strategy, aimed at producing a new “Strategic Concept” for the Alliance in the course of 1991. With this decision, NATO began the process of adapting itself to the post-Cold War world.


EVOLUTION OF NATO's STRATEGY

Since 1949, NATO has always had an agreed “strategy” to guide its policies and force structures. These strategy documents, however, had always been classified, secret texts available to the public only in summary form. After the end of the Cold War, it was recognised that times had changed. So, following the London Summit meeting in July 1990, when NATO leaders called for a new strategic concept to be prepared, it was decided that it should be published.

The 1991 concept acknowledged the radical changes that had recently occurred in the world and in Europe in particular.