NATO's out-of-area operations, Just War and game theory

The evolution of just war has had an undeniable impact on NATO.s strategic thinking and this is reflected in the need of updating and contextualizing its Strategic Concept according to the new mission statements the Organization intends to issue. As it will be more clearly shown in the next session, the North Atlantic Alliance has been updating its tasks and responsibility and, whether this might be interpreted as an incongruence with the original mission it assumed in 1949, it is certainly coherent with and adapted to the environment in which it operates. As expressed in the latest Strategic Concept, NATO intents to operate within the framework of and in accordance with the international law and it legitimates its actions through its core principles and tasks. Among those, the most conspicuous are the collective defence and the cooperative security.

The first is strictly related to Art. 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty, evoked for the first time after the events of September 11th and that legitimated the member states to provide with security an ally of the Organization whenever it might be victim of a clear armed aggression; this implies that an attack to one member state is conceived as an attack to the whole Alliance. Thus, in NATO's terminology, collective defence is a synonym of mutual assistance as a response to an attack launched to any of its members. As it will be better explained in the following pages, this kind of military counter-reaction finds partial coherence within the international law and, to be more specific, in accordance to article 2 of the UN Charter which introduced the concept of self-defence in modern international law.
Furthermore, the Lisbon Summit of October 2010 has represented an occasion also to re-establish a second core task: cooperative security. Such label encapsulates the willingness of the alliances to operate successfully even beyond the borders of its constituting members. The idea of employing its political and military capabilities in order to ensure a secure environment around the globe can be considered as a sub-product of the end of the Cold War disputes. As a matter of fact the responsibility of stretching the intervention of the North Atlantic Alliance world-wide is a consequence of the fact that the organization is facing new kinds of threats and disputes which are no more situated in an indentified part of the globe.
The latest Strategic Concept has introduced both core tasks and principles as rights and duties of the Organization; as not only represent they the actions undertaken by the Alliance but also because they constitute the legitimate motivations such actions. It is therefore possible to infer that both coincide with the political justification of waging a war, however the latter – the cooperative security – can be interpreted as a first step toward the moral argument sustained by NATO in order to provide lawful explanation to its interventions. The difference between the political and moral arguments employed by the Organization will become clearer throughout the present and the following chapter.