Four years after the initial deployment of the enhanced Forward Presence (eFP) model to Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, and Poland, the security and defence architecture of Eastern Europe and NATO has shifted dramatically. The illegal Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, along with the conflicts in Georgia, Libya and Afghanistan, can be seen as the result of a process that began after the fall of the Soviet Union—a fracturing of the post-war consensus in which global security would entail responding to isolated crises on the edges of the rules-based international order. In response to this reversion to a latter-twentieth century norm, NATO launched the eFP, which partnered the Baltics and Poland with Canada, the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom to host and operate a deployment of battalion-sized battle groups. These battle groups included personnel from other member states and were designed to provide a stronger deterrent on NATO’s Eastern flank and reinforce the extension of Article Five to NATO’s more recent member states.

This paper will argue that the eFP is well-designed for the contemporary threat environment due to its emphasis on ensuring transatlantic solidarity; altering the perception of security among the civilian population; offering a reset from NATO’s focus on out-of-area operations; and, borrowing from securitization theory, securitizing the free exchange of information. The eFP model also offers crucial lessons for NATO as it struggles to promote itself among political elites across North America and Western Europe amidst the changing nature of security and defence.