Eisenhower Paper 1: "The Ties that Bind? A History of NATO’s Academic Adventure with the Middle East", by Jean-Loup Samaan and Roman de Stefanis.
About This New Series
The Eisenhower Papers are a new collection of publications dedicated to issues related to the practice of professional military education (PME).
Named in honour of the NATO Defense College’s founding figure and first NATO Supreme Allied Commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, this series of papers aims at providing a platform for scholars, officers and educators from NATO members and partner states to discuss lessons learned in PME, and to analyse past and current challenges in teaching strategic studies in a military environment. The papers are intended to be of interest for any practitioner in the field of military education and strategic studies.
The NDC Research Division welcomes inputs for this series from practitioners at any defense university, war college, or other PME school across the Alliance.
The Inaugural Paper
As the NATO Defense College celebrated this past December the fifth anniversary of the NDC’s NATO Regional Cooperation Course (NRCC), it is worth looking back at this initiative. Born out of long hours of diplomatic negotiations in Brussels in 2009, this academic programme has been bringing together officers and diplomats from NATO countries with their counterparts from Arab States and Israel.
The making of NRCC sheds light on the internal struggle within the Atlantic Alliance on its diplomatic aims and means. In so doing, it illustrates the difficulties of building ties with new partners, and shows how scholarship can play an instrumental role in that process.
This first Eisenhower paper matters for both scholarship and policy. For scholars, it nurtures the on-going debate over the challenges of education in a diplomatic and military environment. For practitioners, it provides insights on what could become a primary instrument of NATO’s diplomatic apparatus in the post-Afghanistan period. In other words, this story is a revealing case study of the interaction between academia, diplomacy, and the military world.
Dr Jeffrey Larsen, Director Research Division
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