The United States and its Atlantic partners: the evolution of American grand strategy

The Cold War's end posed immediate challenges to the Atlantic alliance, but a variety of factors, many of them temporary, conspired to mask this shift for more than a decade. In the longer term, the absence of a common foe has allowed previously suppressed tensions within the Atlantic community to play a more prominent role than in the past. Interests, and especially security interests, within the Alliance are less convergent now than during the Cold War. The challenge for the Allies in the future will be to cooperate absent the discipline once imposed by their respective international situations.