Abstract
This year NATO will celebrate its 60th anniversary. So far the world's most powerful military alliance has been a remarkable success story. However, as the first decade of the new century draws to a close there appears to be a widening strategic rift among the allies. ‘Two-tier NATO’ is by now an established piece of shorthand in international strategic debate to indicate an ‘alliance à la carte’ divided into two or more factions of member states with divergent interests. Evidently, the alliance increasingly struggles to reach consensus on a whole range of strategic issues. So is NATO on a path to disintegration and, ultimately, to failure? This article argues that the organization has developed from a fixed ‘two-tier’ into a rather fluid ‘multi-tier’ alliance. On many issues the alliance is in fact divided into several different camps that are pushing in different directions. Thus, allies can be grouped into one of three tiers: a ‘reformist’, a ‘status-quo’ and a ‘reversal’-oriented
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