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The Atlantic Alliance is perhaps starting its third structural reform. The delicate assimilation of “global strategy” and the priorities concerning war on terror and failed States lead to a series of fundamental questions – diplomatic and doctrinal, philosophical and strategic —, that could be, for a part, unresolved before the Riga Summit. The semantic ambiguities and the divergence of transatlantic or intraeuropean point of views hide imperfectly the reality according to which it is better to build Europe first in order “to think the Atlantic Alliance”, whereas NATO is still considered indispensable if Europeans and Americans want to engage together.

André Dumoulin, attaché at the École royale militaire (Brussels), is lecturer at the University of Liège and at the Université libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Member of the Réseau multidisciplinaire d’études stratégiques (RMES), he recently directed France- OTAN : vers un rapprochement doctrinal ? Au-delà du 40e anniversaire de la crise francoatlantique (Brussels, Bruylant, 2006).