Sten Rynning traces the political history of NATO from its inception in 1949, through to the ongoing Ukraine War and into 2024. This book identifies a pattern in the Alliance’s past, at a critical crossroads as it must decide how it progresses in a rapidly changing global environment.

On 4 April 2025, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) marked the 76th anniversary of the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty, conventionally considered the Alliance’s birthday. At present, NATO finds itself in an uneasy environment–toward the East, Russia continues to wage a war of aggression against Ukraine, precariously close to the Alliance’s border; toward the South-East, the geopolitical map of the Middle East is changing, especially since Hamas’ attack on Israel on 7 October 2023; and to the West, the second Trump administration leads some to wonder whether the United States remains committed to the Alliance’s mutual defence provision, found in its Article V, and the Alliance as a whole. At this critical juncture, Sten Rynning offers a comprehensive political history of the most significant and enduring alliance.

Rynning is well placed to offer such a historical survey. As the director of the Institute of Advanced Study at the University of Southern Denmark, much of his research has concentrated on NATO with him having penned books including NATO in Afghanistan (2012) and NATO Renewed (2005).

While at the time of writing this book, Sweden had not yet acceded to the Alliance—although Finland had. This does not detract from the value this book offers in understanding NATO’s political history and its potential path forward. Central to Rynning’s argumentation is his identification of a pattern throughout NATO’s history, namely that the Alliance oscillates between “great ambition” and “crisis.” The former, characteristic of great ambition, ostensibly occurred with the creation of NATO in 1949 as the Alliance was still in its infancy and bold in its ambitions—a phenomenon that recurred during the early 1990s after the Alliance’s primary competitor, namely the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, collapsed as the Cold War rescinded.

However, the latter, characteristic of crisis, is caused by the fact that NATO was “created to aim high but destined to struggle with the practicality of aspiration.” Herein, after episodes of great ambition, the Alliance purportedly exemplifies a tendency to fall back into “crises of power and confidence.”  It must continuously search for meaning in changing environments as the end of the Cold War, for instance, necessitated.

The book is structured into four parts that trace this pattern. It commences with the ambitious creation of NATO and its early years (1939-1965), followed by an era of “retreat to pragmatism” (1966-1989) which is, once more, followed by an epoch of ambition between 1989 and 2011. The final part of the book (2012-2024) unpacks the crossroads at which NATO presently finds itself. Herein, Rynning outlines how, during the 2010s, NATO dithered and, with the election of Donald Trump to the US presidency in 2016, entered uncertain waters that lasted well into the administration of Joseph Biden. This occurred to  such an extent that, in 2019, French president Emmanuel Macron declared NATO to be experiencing brain death.

However, Rynning identifies the current situation as a pivotal moment in NATO’s history, with the myriad of challenges it faces being self-evident. Thus, he provides three recommendations to the reader which are, in fact, indirectly addressed at NATO.

Firstly, according to Rynning’s prescriptions, NATO should remain realistic about its remit; that being that its primary objective is the security of its territory and the preservation of Western values. Here, Rynning defines a balancing act between the need to protect its core Euro-Atlantic area and confronting challenges emerging further afield, including in the Indo-Pacific. What complicates this matter is that NATO’s enduring challenger–Russia–derives support from China, a reality that arguably must still be fully recognised in Europe. As such, Rynning cautions that NATO “should not go global”–and  resist the temptation to overstretch itself by taking on more of a security role beyond Europe, particularly in Asia.

Secondly, while Europe relies heavily on the protection of the extended American nuclear deterrent, the Alliance’s continental partners ought to solidify Europe’s pillar within the Alliance’s defence structure and assume greater leadership and responsibility therein.

Thirdly, Rynning pointedly laments a pervasive tendency within NATO that over emphasises the importance and recurrence of leaders’ summits. This proliferation of summitry is, in Rynning’s view, a distraction that leads to policy sprawl and shortsightedness. Instead of vesting the leadership of NATO excessively in the hands of heads-of-state and governments, ministers of defence and foreign affairs ought to resume greater authority once more in NATO’s normative course.

In Rynning’s final assessment, he recognises that the Alliance’s security will become increasingly entangled with issues outside of the traditional Euro-Atlantic area, and NATO cannot overlook the Indo-Pacific. This could, in his analysis, be seen in the competition for influence between the US and United Kingdom on the one side, and France on the other, in the burgeoning AUKUS agreement.

Yet, Rynning advocates for a return to a “classical NATO” which first and foremost concentrates on the Euro-Atlantic area and seeks to make this bloc fit for purpose, particularly as it pertains to conventional military force. Moreover, such a traditional NATO must remain mindful of the dichotomy that exists between “the West” (read NATO) and “the East” (read, in particular, Russia) as this will persist even as other challenges emerge. In this context the examples of the Global War on Terrorism and especially the war in Afghanistan, and the concurrent strengthening of Russia, are significant.

Additionally, as dynamics within the Alliance shift–not least due to the ongoing war in Ukraine–Rynning predicts that Poland, Romania, and newly admitted Finland, will gain in influence. He further calls on Germany to assume greater leadership within NATO, unperturbed by its hitherto reluctance to do so. Nonetheless, Rynning realises that Germany is unlikely to move beyond the status quo of the NATO security architecture, its reliance on American protection, and cannot be expected to shoulder leadership within European NATO alone.

The natural complement here is France. Ultimately, Rynning emphasises that the Alliance must decide which path it wishes to pursue going forward. However, he strikes a hopeful chord as he alludes to the “enduring power of NATO’s idea of wanting to live and to survive in peace.”

Overall, this book provides its reader with a well-written historical overview of NATO and provokes some intriguing questions about the Alliance and its future, ones that its leaders would do well to heed.

Jasper Hufschidt Morse is a postgraduate student of War and Conflict Studies at the University of Potsdam, Germany. He previously attained a Bachelor of International Security Studies, with a Major in Middle East and Central Asian Studies, from the Australian National University, in Canberra.

This review article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.