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With the fourth and final seminar on NATO's new Strategic Concept held in Washington on February 23rd and the Group of Experts finalizing its advice to Secretary-General Rasmussen, this short article aims to initiate a debate on NATO's role in the 21st century, which is to be reverberated in the strategic document that is expected to be released around the end of this year. What ought NATO's new Strategic Concept encompass, and perhaps more important, what should remain unaddressed in the new strategic document?

The Strategic Concept is expected to provide history's most successful military alliance with a new strategic guideline that is to reinforce the organisation's purpose and strengthen its resolve within the realm of international security for the coming decade. This implies that the Strategic Concept anticipates strategic shifts and developments within the international system. This generates the first question of whether, and if yes, to what extent, the new Strategic Concept will be successful in looking ahead beyond the current strategic outlook. Should NATO focus primarily on irregular challenges, keeping contingencies for more conventional threats to international security on the shelf, or should it focus on so called hybrid challenges, and more specifically, what would adequate and efficient responses to these challenges look like?

In order to formulate a successful outlook one first needs to find common ground regarding the North Atlantic Treaty Association's profile, which should be more adequately transferred to the general public within the various NATO-member states. Generating and expanding public awareness about the North Atlantic Treaty Association - especially amongst the younger generations - will reinforce public support, and therefore remains pivotal for NATO's relevance in the 21st century.

Furthermore, in order to remain of significance, the new strategic concept ought to acknowledge that the organisation's capacities are limited, and therefore prioritize between areas of vital and peripheral interest. Should NATO remain a collective defence organisation that is predominantly focused on its member states' territorial defence, or should it be formally "transformed" into a collective security organisation that acknowledges that international security and the national interests of its member states will be increasingly - although not solely - threatened by challenges outside the organisation's traditional territorial boundaries?

The second question concerns NATO's internal cohesion in the 21st century. The so called "desolidarisation" within the alliance is primarily centred around prevailing different perceptions within its member states about the security challenges in which NATO should or should not engage. Although all NATO members allegedly agree that the collective defence clause of the Washington Treaty ought to remain pivotal in the 21st century, ambiguous perceptions regarding adequate responses to both current and so called "new" challenges to cyber and energy security; resource scarcity; or security challenges posed by rising powers and non-state actors; the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction; or climate change remain omnipresent.

The ISAF mission in Afghanistan is illustrative for the absence of a shared level of commitment among the organisation's member states - whether caused by national caveats or by political decisions regarding the contribution or withdrawal of a nation's armed forces - which undermines the internal cohesion of the Alliance and is damaging to the operational efforts on the ground. What is to be done to bridge the organisation's member states commitment gap? Should the organisation adjust and transform its consensus-based decision-making process and formally convert into a multitier organisation? Regarding the "new" challenges, the Strategic Concept ought to provide an answer to the question of whether NATO should have a role to play in the above-mentioned set of challenges, and if yes, what an adequate response in the respective realms would encompass?

Several states have expressed a desire to become NATO-members. With the issue regarding the possible admission of Georgia and Ukraine respectively seemingly resolved for the moment, one might argue that the new Strategic Concept should reconsider NATO's enlargement policy. In this respect, the former Secretary-General's statement, that the admission of a new member state should bring added value to the alliance and hence strengthen the alliance's political and military resolve, should be a guiding principle in the organisation's enlargement policy.

The 21st century will be characterized by what is generally referred to as fundamental uncertainty. In order to respond to this uncertainty, the new Strategic Concept should not only emphasize the importance of a solid relationship with Russia, non-NATO member states, the United Nations and the European Union and NGO's but also develop and strengthen relations with countries like China, India and Brazil, and perhaps even Iran, that otherwise might pose challenges to international security. As the current operation in Afghanistan has illustrated, cooperation with non-NATO members as regional or global partners clearly strengthens the Alliance's resolve in international crises, while politically engaging non-integrated powers may contribute to international stability.

The above-mentioned set of questions - which is but a mere selection of questions that the Group of Experts is expected to address in its advice to NATO Secretary-General Rasmussen - underlines the importance of a comprehensive strategic document that encompasses a strategic consensus on both the organisational profile of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation as well as on a set of actual and potential challenges on which the Alliance's members will collectively respond. The content of the new Strategic Concept will redefine both NATO's purpose and relevance in the 21st century.

Djörn Eversteijn is a researcher at the Hague Centre for Strategic Studies.

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