"The alliance should agree... to an effective NATO role against the new threats presented by international terrorism and weapons of mass destruction"
About this Quote
“The alliance should agree...” is the tell: Aznar isn’t just advocating a policy tweak, he’s staging a referendum on what NATO is for. The ellipsis matters because it smuggles in an assumption of urgency and consensus-as-duty. Agreement becomes the moral baseline; hesitation reads as irresponsibility.
Set in the post-9/11 atmosphere, Aznar’s pairing of “international terrorism” with “weapons of mass destruction” is doing heavy political work. It fuses two different categories of threat into a single, electrified bundle - the nightmare scenario that justified expansion of security mandates across borders. That coupling also preempts a narrower reading of NATO as a regional, defensive pact. If the threat is global and potentially catastrophic, the alliance must be global and proactive. “Effective NATO role” sounds technocratic, but it’s a permission slip: a way to normalize new operational theaters, intelligence-sharing, preemption, and expeditionary warfare under the legitimacy of a multilateral brand.
The subtext is aimed as much at allies as at adversaries. Aznar is pressuring Europeans who were wary of mission creep and U.S.-led adventures, asking them to translate solidarity into action. He’s also guarding against NATO drifting into symbolic unity without strategic teeth. In a single sentence, Aznar tries to re-anchor the alliance’s relevance: not as a Cold War relic, but as the manager of a new fear economy where the worst-case scenario becomes the organizing principle of policy.
Set in the post-9/11 atmosphere, Aznar’s pairing of “international terrorism” with “weapons of mass destruction” is doing heavy political work. It fuses two different categories of threat into a single, electrified bundle - the nightmare scenario that justified expansion of security mandates across borders. That coupling also preempts a narrower reading of NATO as a regional, defensive pact. If the threat is global and potentially catastrophic, the alliance must be global and proactive. “Effective NATO role” sounds technocratic, but it’s a permission slip: a way to normalize new operational theaters, intelligence-sharing, preemption, and expeditionary warfare under the legitimacy of a multilateral brand.
The subtext is aimed as much at allies as at adversaries. Aznar is pressuring Europeans who were wary of mission creep and U.S.-led adventures, asking them to translate solidarity into action. He’s also guarding against NATO drifting into symbolic unity without strategic teeth. In a single sentence, Aznar tries to re-anchor the alliance’s relevance: not as a Cold War relic, but as the manager of a new fear economy where the worst-case scenario becomes the organizing principle of policy.
Quote Details
| Topic | War |
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