The trouble with alliances, Pericles said 2,395 years ago, is that "the common cause imperceptibly decays." NATO's common cause is not decaying but it has vastly changed in the 15 years since NATO's founding. As the threat of Soviet aggression in Western Europe receded, the alliance became a political assembly of independent-minded states rather than a military coalition huddling under the exclusive U.S. nuclear umbrella. What NATO has yet to prove is that it can rise to broader, subtler challenges. As Dean Rusk put it: "NATO must adapt itself to a situation in which the Communist threat takes more...
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