After the demise of the Soviet Union, NATO has been facing the challenging task of providing security to the transatlantic area in an environment of new and shifting threats. Its performance and effectiveness have been under the scrutiny of policy makers and scholars. Some arguments indicate that NATO will eventually become ineffective as a military security organization due to enlargement (Barany 2004) and the lack of interest of the United States in the transatlantic alliance (Kupchan 2003). Alternatively, other voices emphasize the increasing military activity of NATO and the out of area operations, thus making it more competent in handling security threats (Minuto-Rizzo 2007) and providing it with an opportunity to become an influential factor in the domestic transformations of its new members. However, both positions acknowledge that the US hegemony has relatively declined over the years and that there is a concurrent rise of other epicentres of power (Zakaria 2009), which opens a debate about the role of NATO in the security policies of the United States and its European partners. This paper provide some elements to address whether NATO, at the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, is a security provider better equipped to deal with international security crises than it was in the aftermath of the Cold War. By using the security governance analytical framework, it argues that NATO has continuously revisited its strategies and developed new policies and instruments to face emerging and new security threats since the mid 1990’s. Further, it explores how NATO has steadily redefined its functions as well as its territorial and operational space as a result of its enlargement and institutional transformations.
