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The leaders of the 28 member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) meet in Lisbon, Portugal, on November 19-20 to chart the future course of the transatlantic military alliance. The gathering in Lisbon is being billed as one of the most important summits in the history of the alliance.
The centrepiece of the NATO summit will be the unveiling of a new strategic concept, or mission statement, to shape the way the alliance defends itself against threats over the next decade. NATO has struggled to define itself in a post-Cold War world of expanding threats and shrinking budgets, and in Lisbon the alliance will try to lay out a vision for itself as a more agile grouping better able to deal with the security realities of the 21st century.