NATO and the B9: Complementary Regimes and Strategic Adaptation on the Eastern Flank
NATO and the B9: Complementary Regimes and Strategic Adaptation on the Eastern Flank

Summary/Abstract: The European security architecture is undergoing profound transformations and faces serious challenges against the backdrop of the ongoing conflict between the Russian Federation and Ukraine, the intensification of hybrid threats, but also motivated by a possible gradual reduction of the American military commitment in Europe. Thus, NATO is faced with serious adaptation challenges, especially on the Eastern flank. This paper aims to analyse the changing strategic dynamics on NATO’s Eastern flank, through the lens of inter­ national regime theory and recent institutional developments. In the context of the amplification of security threats after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the paper analyses NATO’s adaptation mechanisms and assesses the role of the Bucharest 9 (B9) format as a complementary regime. The present paper aims to make a theoretical and ap­plied contribution to understanding how informal regional formats can function as complementary regimes within a multilateral security architecture. The main objective is to test the relevance of the theory of international regimes in the case of the B9 format, as a platform for political and strategic cooperation in Eastern Europe, active in a context marked by systemic pressures and geopolitical instability. While NATO is undoubtedly a consolidated international regime, with formal decision-making mechanisms and a rigid institutional structure, the B9 remains a flexible format, without its own institutional or decision-making capacity, but with an increasingly visible function of political alignment, regional coherence and strategic synchroni­ sation. From this perspective, the research proposes to reconceptualise the NATO-B9 relationship not in hierarchical or competitive terms, but in the logic of multilayer governance, in which the different levels of cooperation - formal, political, military - complement each other, instead of overlapping.

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