NATO’s Strategy vis-à-vis the South Caucasus Marion Kipiani 1 NATO’s Strategy vis-à-vis the South Caucasus: what next? Author: Marion Kipiani, MA List of abbreviations CEE Central Eastern Europe CSCE Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe EAPC Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council IPAP Individual Partnership Action Plan ISAF International Security Assistance Force KFOR Kosovo Force MAP Membership Action Plan NACC North-Atlantic Cooperation Council NGC NATO-Georgia Council NRC NATO-Russia Council NRF NATO Response Force PARP Planning and Review Process PfP Partnership for Peace SHAPE Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe WMD weapons of mass destruction 2014 will be a crucial year for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to review and evaluate the changes it has gone through over the past quarter-century. The end of the Cold War has profoundly transformed the Alliance’s structure and key mission: it has expanded from sixteen to 28 members and increasingly become involved in “out-of-area” crisis management. At the end of 2014, NATO’s longest and most extensive war-fighting mission, the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) in Afghanistan will come to an end. At the same time, with the ongoing security crisis in south-eastern Ukraine, the organization is facing renewed instability close to its borders. Russia is increasingly flexing its muscles in the geographic space of the former Soviet Union, as well as being vocally opposed to the Alliance’s strategic goal of a “Europe whole and free” within a western- dominated space of political, economic, and security integration. In the South Caucasus, at least one country is anxiously awaiting the Alliance’s Wales Summit in September 2014. The government and interested public of Georgia have been screening the utterances of the leaders of both NATO and its foremost member states for signs