It is always a special pleasure for me to discuss NATO and the transformation of the Alliance, and this is an exciting moment in NATO's history. Here I shall address, in thematic terms, the issue of perception versus reality, and in this context the mismatch in the understanding of what really is going on in NATO and what NATO's new direction is all about. I think it is fair to say that if you asked someone who studied and lived in the last century about NATO, they could probably tell you very easily, and with some degree of accuracy, why the Alliance was important in the twentieth century. I think that same person, if asked the same question about the value of the Alliance in the twenty-first century, would have a much more difficult time explaining in a coherent way exactly what purposes the Alliance serves, and what it is doing to make the security environment better to correspond with contemporary realities. And that is really the task at hand for those of us who care very deeply about this, the world's greatest alliance: to talk about the new realities and the perceptions versus the realities of the Alliance.
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