60 years NATO, 10 years Poland in NATO, the future of the Alliance

“Moving our country into a whole new geo-political area” – thus Jerzy Buzek, prime minister at the time of Poland’s accession to NATO, described the objective of the membership ten years after the event. I believe this opinion expresses not only the quintessential meaning of NATO membership for a post-Communist country - until 1991 a member of the Warsaw Treaty - and not only the re-orientation of Poland’s foreign, security and defence policy at the turn of the 1980’s and 1990’s, but also the motivation for the later international activity. By entering NATO – and five years later, the European Union – the country fulfilled both its strategic objectives, directing its internal development towards a state more secure, democratic and affluent.

For more read the article of  Maria Wągrowska, a defense policy expert in her article Poland in the Western sphere (pdf, 5 pages, 88 kB)

From the Polish perspective the future of NATO is good and certain. This is for one basic reason: we all need NATO. We need the Atlantic Alliance to ensure national security of its member states as well as security and stability in the transatlantic zone and in its immediate neighbourhood. No criticism directed against NATO questions this basic need. The criticism mostly refers to what is not comprised in the initial mandate of the Alliance, i.e. operations which are not covered by the Article 5, the so called out of area operations.
In its fundamental functions the Alliance did not fail during the cold war, nor afterwards. It did ensure security to its member states. And there is no sign that this could differ in the future.
It will go on the same way provided that the Alliance focuses on its primary tasks and resists the temptation of "doing everything and everywhere" and if only it can learn quickly from its own mistakes.

More about the common challenges of NATO from the Polish perspective in an article by Prof. Roman Kuźniar, University of Warsaw, The future of NATO (pdf, 4 pages, 104 kB).