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The transatlantic alliance which played a key roll in preserving European security in the Cold War has become far more than an alliance in the traditional sense: it has become, to borrow Karl Deutsch’s term, a genuine collective security community, and continues to provide the most capable and effective framework for joint action to deal with the transnational security challenges that confront the world in the 21st century. Prior to 9/11 very few security analysts would have included international terrorism as a major challenge to international security. It was seen as a form of low-intensity conflict largely of interest to national governments and local or regional law enforcement agencies in countries affected. Europeans in the 1990s were primarily concerned with the crises in the former Yugoslavia. Americans were primarily preoccupied with efforts to prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and their possible acquisition by rogue states.