Obama Gets Mixed Results at NATO Summit

Sally McNamara / November 20, 2010

President Obama’s flying visit to Lisbon this weekend resulted in a mixed bag of results. On a practical level, NATO made big strides in fashioning the transatlantic alliance for the 21^st century. On a personal level however, President Obama did not succeed in turning this weekend’s summits into ones that prioritized new START.

By far and away, the most important of the three summits this weekend was the NATO heads-of-state summit. The alliance agreed its first Strategic Concept of the millennium, outlining NATO’s core purpose and tasks. The 2010 Strategic Concept, while far shorter than the last one, reinforced the core elements of transatlantic security including: affirmation that Article V remains the bedrock of the alliance; that so long as nuclear weapons exist, NATO will be a nuclear alliance; and that missile defense should become a core competency of the alliance. The alliance pledged to integrate and upgrade NATO members’ missile defense capabilities, taking the first step toward a genuinely transatlantic-wide missile defense architecture. It is important that this policy is now translated into a concrete action plan, with members pledging hard commitments that fairly share the burden of common defense. (more…)