This month the North Atlantic Treaty Organization will hold its next summit in Chicago. Unlike European Union summits, which take place almost monthly, NATO's are infrequent. This helps to explain the inflated rhetoric that surrounds them: The November 2010 summit in Lisbon, for example, was described as nothing less than "the most important in NATO's history." Will the Chicago summit prove to be an exception to this rule?
For a while, that seemed likely, with the meeting initially billed as an "implementation summit," at which NATO's political leaders would focus on assessing the progress of the ambitious agreements reached in Lisbon. But four political developments that have modified the international security agenda are likely to transform Chicago into a high-profile summit in its own right:
(1) The revolutions in the Arab world and NATO's military intervention in Libya have refocused the alliance's attention on the Middle East and Northern Africa.