Sten Rynning

• University of Southern Denmark

War has come back in Europe, and NATO stands at the forefront of the response to Russia’s aggression of Ukraine. But how does NATO function? How do NATO member states perceive and act through the Atlantic Alliance? And, in the end, how do states shape NATO’s cohesion and relevance in the face of threats? The Nations of NATO is concerned with nation...

War has come back in Europe, and NATO stands at the forefront of the response to Russia’s aggression of Ukraine. But how does NATO function? How do NATO member states perceive and act through the Atlantic Alliance? And, in the end, how do states shape NATO’s cohesion and relevance in the face of threats? The Nations of NATO is concerned with nation...

This chapter engages realism as a tradition of thought invariably entangled with a normative drive to speak truth to power. To understand political power, realists hold, is to seek to restrain it. Yet, realist restraint risks leaving the human field barren and void of aspiration, in turn enabling “strong man” politics and unrestrained power. Realis...

NATO has promised to address China as “an alliance” but struggles to define underpinning principles. This article explores NATO's policy options and prospects. It traces the evolution of NATO China policy from 2017 on; assesses NATO's ability to pull China under its resiliency policy regime; and evaluates NATO's capacity to address wider issues of...

NATO has embarked on the renewal of its Strategic Concept, the latest version of which dates to 2010. The question is whether this opportunity for renewal will result in a broad and elastic set of core tasks that have wide political appeal but that are ill suited to meet NATO’s strategic challenges. The Alliance opted for political convenience in 2...

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) is back in the business of deterring aggression on the part of Russia. This return to great power deterrence has brought widely acknowledged military challenges related to power projection, force modernization, and burden sharing but also and notably a political challenge of defining NATO’s collective p...

NATO’s Lessons in Crisis: Institutional Memory in International Organizations. By Heidi Hardt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 292p. $99.00 cloth, $34.95 paper. - Volume 18 Issue 2 - Sten Rynning

NATO’s crisis management engagement came of age in the Kosovo crisis of 1999, as the alliance committed fully to this role in its 1999 Strategic Concept and consequently inscribed the engagement in the Euro-Atlantic security architecture it sought to refine in subsequent years. The war in Afghanistan brought change as NATO at first sought to implem...

Over the past thirty years Denmark has become a capable and willing expeditionary ally, not least on account of an accelerated investment in new forces in the early to mid-2000s. With the 2005–2009 defence agreement the Danish Army scrapped its concept of conscripted mobilization and fully committed to deployable capacities; the navy became a ‘blue...

NATO allies have since the inception of the alliance sought to establish an Atlanticist habit of political consultation to prevent political go-it-alone drift on the part of key allies and help define NATO in regard to major strategic issues. Today, observers dispute the ability of Atlanticism to sustain the Alliance. This article reviews the histo...

For more than a decade beginning in the early 2000s, NATO’s main area of concern was crisis management in Afghanistan via the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). With the closing of the ISAF mission and in parallel with Russia’s aggression in Ukraine, both in 2014, NATO returned to a preoccupation with European security and col...

This chapter provides readers with an overview of the transformations of French defence policy since 1991. To a large degree, French defence policy is still perceived through a 'Gaullist' prism by non-specialist observers, who tend to analyse French defence developments by referring to a pursuit of 'independence' at all costs, or a willingness to m...

Det er i NATO-sammenhænge, at dansk sikkerhedspolitisk aktivisme træder klarest frem. NATO er først og fremmest platformen, hvorfra Danmark bidrager til at fastholde USA i europæisk sikkerhed. NATO er også mekanismen, hvorigennem Danmark etablerer det tætte militære samarbejde med udvalgte allierede, som muliggør danske militære bidrag under forske...

Danish foreign policy activism appears most clearly in a NATO context. The Atlantic Alliance is first and foremost the vehicle through which Denmark contributes to ensuring US engagement in European security politics. NATO is the mechanism that enables Denmark to establish close military relations with select allies, which in turn facilitates Danis...

With much fanfare, NATO declared its rapid reaction force—the NATO Response Force (NRF)—an Initial Operational Capability in 2004. This article addresses four questions: Where did the NRF come from? What does it look like in 2017? What have been the major obstacles for the NRF fulfilling its promises? And where is the NRF likely to go? The article...

Baggrundssektionen indledes med Sten Rynnings og Christilla Roederer-Rynnings status over præsident Donald Trumps første tid i Det Hvide Hus.

The Alliance’s success in adapting its deterrence posture has brought into focus a range of more complex challenges.

The Harmel review of 1966–7 is a story of how NATO collectively attempted to define a political role for itself; how France resisted; and how Germany was of two minds and hoped to resolve tensions by bridge-building. Much has changed since then—Britain is exiting the EU; Russia is an assertive but lesser power; the United States intends to pivot to...

Sten Rynning sætter fokus på ‘Danmarks nationale interesse’ med udgangspunkt i et af hovedbudskaberne i Taksøe-Jensens udredning: ‘at Dan- marks nationale interesse skal stå klart og guide prioriteter i udenrigspolitikken’.

Nuno P. Monteiro, Theory of Unipolar Politics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014 (anmeldt af Sten Rynning)

The war in Ukraine is revelatory of a malaise in Europe's security order created by Russia's resistance to western institutions on the one hand and the western desire to maintain these institutions while partnering with Russia on the other. Absent a sense of priorities, western policy risks contributing to the erosion of Europe's security order tha...

Sharing Military Capabilities: Dead-End or Future of Defense? The framework nations concept, elaborated in Germany, was endorsed at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) Summit in Wales in 2014. It attempts to organize defense cooperation between a limited number of countries which share a certain cultural proximity. However, the concept do...

Stephanie Hofmann argues in this thought provoking book that Europe’s security order can move forward only if there is ideological convergence among the major national players. By ideological convergence Hofmann understands the alignment of parties in government, and their level of agreement, she contends, explains strength and weakness in the Euro...

This article examines NATO's transformation from the Cold War to the present and offers a framework of interpretation. Transformation has entailed a downgrading of territorial defence and an upgrading of out-of-area crisis management, as well as diplomatic engagement and partnership. NATO has thus become a more diversified and globalized alliance....

Throughout the first decade of the 21st century Denmark was one of the most active countries, relatively speaking, in wars on terror and other interventions. Denmark has been on the front line in Afghanistan and Iraq, and it flew a large number of bombing missions in Libya in 2011 when the United States was looking for reliable allies to step forwa...

Armed interventions of the past decades demonstrate that strategic leadership can give way to lofty campaign plans, conflicting strategic narratives and concern with tactical, as opposed to strategic, issues. The intervention debate rightfully emphasizes the need for both leadership and institution-building to rectify this situation, but then break...

This book provides an authoritative account of how the US, British, and French armies have transformed since the end of the Cold War. All three armies have sought to respond to changes in their strategic and socio-technological environments by developing more expeditionary capable and networked forces. Drawing on extensive archival research, hundre...

It is widely acknowledged that NATO has multiple rationales. What is more contestable is the view that the burgeoning complexity of the security environment feeds these rationales and that NATO may not be able to cope. If each rationale is like a personality, then NATO's multiple personalities have a corrosive effect on the Alliance since they prev...

The European Union has ventured into the business of power politics with its common security and defence policy (CSDP). Realism can explain both why the EU is being pulled into this business and why it is failing to be powerful. Although realism has much to offer, it is not the dominant approach to the study of the EU and its foreign affairs becaus...

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has since the turn of the new century experienced a double transformation gap: between global and regionally oriented allies and between allies emulating new military practices defined by the United States and allies resisting radical change. This article takes stock of these gaps in light of a decade's...

This chapter provides a brief overview of the post-Cold War years in France to set the background for current changes. The extent of change is determined along network-centric warfare (NCW), expeditionary warfare, and effect-based operations (EBOs). It also describes the trajectory of change and the principal challenges facing French forces. Milita...

NATO member states are all undergoing some form of military transformation. Despite a shared vision, transformation has been primarily a US-led process centered on the exploitation of new information technologies in combination with new concepts for “networked organizations” and “effects-based operations.” Simply put, European states have been unab...

It is common to portray the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) as a reasonable and indeed functional response to a gap in the European Union’s (EU) panoply of external relations tools. The standard practice of influencing neighbours via the promise of EU membership had run its course with the December 2003 decision to enlarge in a big bang — with...

In this article, we argue that Realism recently has eschewed big and important questions of war and peace and that revived Classical Realism can help bring Realism back on track. Modern Realists tend to assume that states are either all status quo players or all revisionists, and the result is a slippery grasp of the sources and dynamics of interna...

The engagement of the Atlantic Alliance in the Middle East dates back to the founding of the Alliance. With one eye on this history and one eye on current controversies, this article investigates the preconditions for and nature of the allies' engagement in the region in order to assess whether the Middle East today is causing a rupture within the...

The European Union has since 2003 developed both a security and a Weapons of Mass Destruction strategy, and it has become the primary interlocutor of Iran in the dispute related to Iran's nuclear development. These are signs of significant policy progress. However, the fact that four years of nuclear diplomacy have brought few results invites a cri...

Erfaringen tilsiger, at eksterne magter ikke kan styre udviklingen i Afghanistan. Og dog bør NATO ikke bare trække sig ud – for det vil ikke blot underminere artikel fem og dermed Alliancen, men også selve den internationale orden, som Vesten støtter sig til.

Amerikansk sikkerhedspolitik drives af underlig- gende bekymring for, om USA kan holde Euro-Asien fragmenteret og svagt. Et centralt virkemiddel er geografiske brohoveder fra Europa til Asien, og de udsving vi oplever, skyldes forskellige syn på disse brohoveder.

NATO won the Cold War but still the security policies of the allies were challenged. The political vacuum created by a vanishing enemy eroded the security and comfort of the political status quo and also invited national considerations of how to capitalize on the potential for change. What followed for NATO as a whole was a period during which alli...

NATO’s ability to outlive the end of the Cold War has sparked a debate on the causes of the Alliance’s apparent good health. All can agree that NATO has changed since 1989: it has enlarged its membership—in 1999 with three countries, in 2004 with seven; it has enlarged, moreover, its missions to go “out of area” and conduct crisis management and mo...

The terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 changed the security agenda of all NATO allies. The 19 allies declared in the Article 5 declaration of September 12, 2001 that they “stand ready to provide the assistance that may be required as a consequence of these acts of barbarism,” while they and other Euro-Atlantic Partnership...

NATO has outlived the Cold War and is well on its way to celebrate its sixtieth birthday—a remarkable event in the history of international relations. This analysis has argued that NATO’s continuity is made possible not because NATO happens to be an institution with particular features or because the United States wants to control European security...

This book provides an overview of what has happened to NATO from the closing stages of the Cold War to the new era of international terrorism. However, it is more than that. It also argues that NATO has travelled a course that contradicts the prevailing image of an organization in decline and crisis. NATO must be crafted by its members to fit the s...

The vigorous debate addressing the potential of the European Union’s security and defence policy is indicative of high hopes and severe policy problems. This article examines the likelihood that EU member-states will develop the strategic culture - reflecting common interests and views of the world - that can be said to be a precondition for a succ...

This article explains why the EU in recent years has gained an upper hand in Allied defence planning. The development is surprising in light of reforms undertaken by NATO in the mid-1990s and also the 1998-99 US ambition to reinforce NATO's defence planning process with the Defence Capabilities Initiative. The article argues that a number of Europe...

Danish Security Policy : International Activism and European Ambiguity, by Sten Rynning Danish security policy has become activist and militarized in the post-Cold War era. Denmark has singled out the UN and Nato as pillars of a new order which is compatible with its 'liberal peasant values'. However, tensions have arisen from divergences between t...

How well prepared has France been politically for the operational implications of its efforts to build a military instrument designed for extra‐territorial interventions such as that conducted by NATO in Yugoslavia in 1999? Did the prolonged bombing campaign and the question of deploying ground troops provoke severe criticism and controversies? Thi...

In June 1994 Russia agreed to sign NATO's Partnership for Peace framework document (PFP). From the time the PFP concept was proposed, in October 1993, the Russian government has had to probe NATO's intentions, clarify its own ambitions, and adjust its foreign policy to domestic political processes. The balancing act eventually succeeded. This artic...

Denmark, a founding member of the Atlantic Alliance, was for many years a reluctant Atlantic ally. Given its geographical location and possession of Greenland, both of which ensured American interest in its national survival, Denmark maintained low defence expenditures and dissented on key issues within the Alliance. 2 This is no longer the case, s...