The United States and the Defence of the ‘Old Continent’: A Different Commitment or a ‘Peripheral Strategy’?

If the prospect of a hangman’s noose concentrates the mind wonderfully, the occupation of Kuwait by Iraq’s Saddam Hussein in August 1990 should have had a similar effect upon the activities of the North Atlantic Council. The breakup of the Soviet empire in 1990 and the concurrent termination of the cold war had required a new look at the justification for NATO’s survival. Since its raison d’etre was the containment of Soviet expansionism its future was in great doubt. And there were voices in all the member nations ready to pronounce eulogies over its dying body. The shock of the Iraqi invasion, however, pointed out the dangers that still lay ahead in the post-cold war 1990s, which NATO might help to contain. The crisis in the Persian Gulf raised to the forefront the question of the ‘out-of-area’ role of the allies, a question that had not been resolved, or fully confronted, in the forty years of NATO’s history.