A Sense of Return: NATO’s Libyan Intervention in Perspective

Commenting on NATO’s 2011 intervention on behalf of Libyan rebels fighting to overthrow the regime of Muammar Gaddafi, a Swiss newspaper of international reputation asserted that the Atlantic Alliance was applying ‘the art of the possible’.1 The author declined to add that NATO’s action came at the end of more than a decade of attempting the near-impossible missions of regime change and nation-building in Afghanistan. What was deemed possible in March 2011 involved a considerable retreat from the ambitions of 2001. The alliance’s transformation — its most fundamental paradigm shift — has been under way for the two decades since the end of the Cold War and was not initiated but rather accelerated by its response to the events of 11 September 2001 (9/11). The transformation is as much the accidental product as it is the deliberate work of 22 years; NATO has attempted since 1989 to anticipate future challenges, and in its strategic concepts has articulated those challenges in a coherent fashion, but it has been conditioned by events as thoroughly as it has foreseen and shaped them. As it winds down its mission in Afghanistan, the alliance is at a watershed. It is not about to dissolve or disintegrate. As a coalition of states bound by shared political values, whose members continue to find it useful militarily and diplomatically, it endures.2