It is paradoxical to speak of alliances at the beginning of the twenty-first century, at a moment when the last of the dominant ideologies of the previous century is turning away from liberalism. What is left of yesterday’s antagonisms? The great imperial and ideological international confrontations which led to world wars have long vanished, giving way to random global economic competition and unbridled development, without open war between military powers but not without conflict, without victims but not without humiliation, frustration or vague antagonism. Should we prudently retain yesterday’s schemes and keep a precautionary alliance, either because we think the future holds a resurgence of those traditional bloody power struggles or because global competition leads groups with strongly conflicting interests to need a traditional armed defence of their threatened common interests? Everyone will judge for themselves. But the concept of an alliance that looks back to yesterday’s power relationships may appear something of an anachronism today.

It is true that we are no longer in those times when the ‘free peoples’ allied themselves in struggles to the death against Nazi and Japanese imperialists, or when the barrage of Communist ideology combined with the promotion of Western values led to the Washington Treaty of March 1949. Sixty years later, we find ourselves in another world, of rapid change, loss of unity and accelerated strategic ‘deconstruction’; a heterogeneous world which struggles to preserve the universality of the solutions to its problems. And, following the example of most of the instruments developed at the end of the Second World War—a world whose population has since almost tripled—the organization which embodies the North Atlantic Treaty, NATO, is dithering. It is having difficulty dealing with the strategic fluidity of an uncertain world. Now, to respond to the various challenges facing it, it has launched a process of continual transformation, a kind of dash from summit to summit. The next one is in Strasbourg-Kehl at the beginning of April.

The question of whether it will manage to achieve a structure capable of always meeting the collective security needs of its different members is important. It has been widely and exhaustively pored over in recent years; it is also discussed in this article and will be on the agenda of the April summit.