The relevance of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (Nato) in a post-Cold War world has been a topic of heated discussion and debate for three decades now. The withdrawal of Nato troops from Afghanistan, the alliance’s longest-ever operation which lasted 20 years, has brought the issue of the organisation’s role and its future into the spotlight once more.

The key to the alliance’s future, to borrow the framework used by some geostrategic experts, is the urgent need to address the core question of its geographical scope. The priorities, challenges, and requirements for Nato to stay relevant and effective in the emerging strategicsecurity architecture of Europe, Asia, the Middle East and the Arctic are very different.

Given that Nato was the product of a trans-Atlantic union against an expansionist Soviet Union, many argue that its primary task remains protecting the West from the Moscow threat. Today’s Russia is no longer what it was during the Cold War and the threat it poses to the Western world is of a different order, but it is a threat nonetheless, goes the thinking.

Grey operations such as the Skripal attack, alleged political interference, and nuclear sabre-rattling by Moscow are all part of the mix. Nato traditionalists warn repeatedly of the danger of the alliance’s attention and energies being subsumed in countering China at the cost of maintaining an adequate response to Russia. As for battling Beijing’s growing influence on global and regional institutions, that is a separate issue for Nato to deal with.

Asia, the second crucial geography for the alliance, is primarily about the China question which needs to be analysed and addressed separately. China’s economic, technological, and military heft, in conjunction with its positioning as an ideology/values differentiator, poses a complex challenge for Nato. Essentially, the alliance has to determine if it has an institutional role in Asia.

If the answer is yes, a new framework, and explicitly not an extension of its current charter, needs first to be thought through and then its practical implementation gamed before taking hard-line public postures which sound like, and are correctly regarded as, empty threats by the Chinese.

Nato members including France and the United Kingdom are already increasing their maritime presence in the Indo-Pacific independent of any deployment by Nato to counter Chinese moves, which brings the relevance of the alliance into question if the USA is not equally committed to upping the ante on China.

In Central/ West Asia, where Nato has had an active and at times overbearing presence ever since the 9/11 attacks, the results have been mixed to say the least. That is because it lacks an effective political mechanism through which to lead its in-country engagements; it is military-led, not multi-dimensional.

But does the West have the stomach for an integrated political, military, and development strategy? Nato may do far better to focus on the Arctic which is increasingly being seen as a zone of military tension with Russia beefing up its air and naval deployment and China graduating to a dual-role presence in the region.