Thirty years after its adoption in December 1967, the Harmel report can be seen as a turning point in the history of the Alliance. By postulating NATO's compatibility with the changing nature of international relations, the report's conceptual framework provided an answer to the political dimension of the Alliance's mid-1960s crisis – which, fundamentally, was a crisis of legitimacy. From then on, NATO's increasingly active role in East–West relations would complement its original rationale – the defence of its members in the narrow sense – with a new one – the management of European security writ large, thus enhancing, for at least two decades, the Alliance's raison d'être as a whole. With the benefit of hindsight, the long-term significance of the Harmel report is, in fact, indisputable: how could NATO have survived the disappearance of the Soviet threat and the end of East–West conflict had it not been for the post-Cold War expansion of its ‘new tasks’ along the lines of the Harmel report?