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Since its origins, in the context of the Cold War's beginning, NATO has been a robust defensive alliance, acting in accordance with UN Charter, as a collective defence structure based on solidarity and mutual trust. Nowadays it has 28 member states and one can say that it fulfilled its main role: to protect the West against communist/Soviet threats using the deterrence and containmemt tools. Neither USSR nor its main instrument, the Warsaw Pact dare to attack the Euro-Altantic area. Our main assumption is that because the specific national interests of each member state, because of the domestic-constitutional issues and bureaucratic obstacles, the Alliance cannot yet forge a common strategic culture for all its members and also lacks a common lens for detecting real risks and therats, be they nation states or non-states actors. Nowadays, Russia and Islamic State are the main adversaries for the Western states, thus NATO should be more effective in dealing with them. And there is a need for reform and transformation. Divergences between adepts of territorial defence and those of pro-active "out of area" missions go in addition to divergences concerning the neeed for increased defence budgets for all members and especially concering the attitude towards Russia. Moscow used economic and energy tools trying to divise some allies like Hungary, Greece and Bulgaria and it partially succeeded. Using some theories of alliances and of democratic peace, resorting to recent facts and figures related to NATO's activities and plans, will help the reader understand the problem of increasing the power vs. increasing the security dilemma and the prospect of future conflicts.

Due to the tremendous ideological stakes of the issue both before and after 1989, the impact of the October Revolution on the Romanian socialist movement was either exaggerated or minimized. If communist literature naturally emphasized the influence of the events in Russia among Romanian socialists, the anticommunist narrative limited its hold to some few radical leaders and to their immediate followers. This article goes beyond these biased perspectives by restoring the topic in its historical environment. Eventually, it tends to corroborate the communist "side of the truth": the changes undergone by the Romanian "proletarian milieu" back in the early 1920s, i.e. the radicalization of the socialist discourse, the mobility of the socialist leadership or the reorganization of the Socialist Party, confirm the significant weight of the October Revolution in the economy of Romanian socialism.