| Summary/Abstract |
This special issue examines NATO’s past with an eye to better understanding its present and its future. NATO’s history, now running over seventy years, can no longer be framed in Cold War terms alone. Nor can the organization be understood fully as a post-Cold War institution. Today’s NATO is a product of both of these eras. A reconsideration of NATO’s place in history encourages us to consider NATO’s past, even its contemporary past, from different angles. The articles in this special issue move away from studying NATO’s relationship with any one particular geopolitical event or crisis and instead examine how NATO developed over years and over decades. This effort to draw back the historical lens has had revealing results. It opens new vistas for explaining how NATO thrived and survived for decades, and pondering whether it will survive for many more.
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