‘Déjà vu all over again’?: 11 September 2001 and NATO Military Transformation

Abstract

Just over a decade after the 11 September 2001 (9/11) terrorist attacks, the heads of state and government of NATO met in Chicago on 20–21 May 2012. The Chicago Summit meeting had three main issues on its agenda: Afghanistan; burden-sharing and global partnerships.2 The primary issue discussed by the heads of state and government of the alliance member states was the policy for NATO’s exit from Afghanistan by 2014. NATO’s engagement in Afghanistan has been an important yet divisive issue for the alliance for most of the past decade, and agreeing a strategy for a workable exit from that country was thus unsurprisingly the main focus of the summit. The military, political and economic commitment the alliance made to Afghanistan was not a direct result of 9/11, but the conflict in Afghanistan was. The second major issue on the summit agenda was the question of burden-sharing. Burden-sharing has been a perennial issue virtually throughout the alliance’s 63-year history, but is an issue that gained increased saliency in the 1990s, after the dissipation of the Cold War. The events in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 cast the issue in a new and harsh light, and since then military transformation has been a central pillar of NATO policy. The third main item on the Chicago Summit’s agenda was strengthening and enlarging the alliance’s global partnerships. All three of these items on the alliance’s summit agenda in Chicago are a legacy of the terrorist attacks in New York and Arlington of a decade earlier.