ABSTRACT
Regional security regimes come in different flavors. They usually emerge from recognition by a group of regional states that they stand to enhance their security by cooperating with one another, either to regulate their own conflicts or to ward off an extra-regional challenger. It is not necessarily the case that only regional states can sustain such a regime, with NATO a prime example. NATO is focused on protecting the security of democratic Europe, and even though it binds Europe to the United States in a transatlantic partnership, still there exists a high level of security coordination among the European members of NATO, who are also linked together in the machinery of the European Union.
