In April 2012, the North Atlantic Council agreed on the new North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) policy guidelines on counterterrorism. On May 20, 2012, the Alliance’s Heads of State and Government endorsed the policy guidelines at their summit in Chicago and tasked the North Atlantic Council to “prepare an Action Plan to further enhance NATO’s ability to prevent, deter, and respond to terrorism by identifying initiatives to enhance threat awareness, capabilities, and engagement.”1 What may appear as routine NATO business—the agreement of a policy and the development of an implementation plan—is in fact groundbreaking news for the Alliance. Until now, NATO did not have an agreed policy to define its role and mandate in countering the terrorist threat, notwithstanding the fact that a terrorist attack was the origin of its first and only invocation of the Article 5 collective defense clause.